(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2011)
Clark, Jennifer; Knox-Hayes, Janelle
In this article we investigate how two cases of ‘intangible assets,’ carbon emissions credits and intellectual property, shift the balance of economic activity between and across regions. Carbon emissions credits and intellectual property portfolios require predictable and enforceable property rights regimes to gain and retain value. Hence these assets and the intermediaries that trade them generally operate within advanced economies. Our analysis highlights several findings. First, large, integrated TNCs play a key role in the emerging markets for these intangible assets by driving investment, directing acquisitions, and influencing the structure and character of the assets themselves through the regulatory regimes that define them. Second, the public policy interests in innovation and sustainability shaping the governance structures that assign these assets with property rights do not alter their fundamental operation as financial instruments. Thus these intangible assets are more than efforts to codify and fix a market price to the externalities of the production processes of carbon emissions and research. They also create geographic sites of alternative, competitive investment. We suggest that these assets produce a geography that both siphons off capital from production sites and isolates assets in privileged financial and investment capitals.
(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2010-05)
Clark, Jennifer
To understand the processes of growth and change within regional economies researchers periodically engage in the evaluation and categorization of those regions. The resulting typologies serve to shape perceptions regarding key industries (e.g. biotechnology, IT) and successful regions (e.g. Silicon Valley, Boston). However, these discourses of knowledge production and localized innovation rarely connect to the underlying narratives of regional growth and decline either in theory or in practice. Since 2007, there is a renewed interest in mapping the long-term economic trends in US regions motivated by questions about the origins and effects of the global recession.
To merge the discussions of the spatial distribution of innovation and production, I turn a theoretical framework provided by the emerging discussion of “evolutionary economic geography” (EEG). EEG provides an analytical approach to regional economies which balances innovation against job creation rather than privileging technology over production.
First, I begin by tracing six regions through a set of historical analyses of regional economies used to develop influential typologies. I then trace those regions through the “typology of innovation districts” project to ascertain their current position as innovative regions relative to other US regions. Finally, I analyze these six regions using recent employment data. The findings indicate that the geographies of innovation and production may be diverging rather than converging in the US presenting a challenge for regional development policy.