Geografisk politisk ekonomi

"Geografisk politisk ekonomi": etiketten innefattar tre akademiska discipliner. Av Max Webers klassiska trefaldighet, två -- bara "samhälle" fattas. Det är för en utomstående alltså inte helt klart vad G.P.E. egentligen är. Eric Sheppard, professor i geografi vid UCLA, introducerar i en artikel i Journal of Economic Geography (ett annat sätt att kombinera begreppen!) G.P.E., och kontrasterar också denna forskningstradition med nationalekonomernas "New Economic Geography". 

Marshall konstaterar också att "politisk ekonomi" är ett mångtydigt begrepp, men menar att dess genalogi inom den geografiska forskningen går tillbaka det tidiga 1970-talets radikala geografi. Det fundamentala teoretiska bidraget ("intervention") var David Harveys The Limits to Capital från 1982, en utarbetning av Marx teori om kapitalism och ojämn utveckling. Detta är alltså en annan nationalekonomisk genealogi, tillbaka till Marx och Ricardo, än den moderna

"Diversifying remarkably since the 1990s under the influence of feminist and post-prefixed epistemologies, it now embraces many trenchant critics of Marxian economic geography’s economism and ‘capitocentralism’ (Gibson-Graham, 1996). Yet it remains haunted by Marx: a post-Marxist subdiscipline (cf. Derrida, 1994). Indeed, Harvey remains a profoundly influential figure: Critics of a squarely Marxist account still feel compelled to establish their position by distancing themselves from him (Amin and Thrift, 2005). " (s. 320)

Sheppard sammanfattar GPE så här. "Beyond conceptualizing capitalism as an unstable economic system, characterized by uneven geographical development, geographical political economists insist on the following."

1. kapitalism är inte det enda ekonomiska systemet
2. "geography is not exogenous to the economy, a constraint on or determinant of economic possibilities, but is produced alongside economic activities. These produced spatialities nonetheless shape ongoing trajectories: A socio-spatial dialectic (Soja, 1980)." 
3. "economic processes must be considered in relation to the biophysical, cultural and social processes with which they co-evolve (the formation of soils, water and other ‘natural resources’, gender, social class, subject and identity formation, etc.).  (s. 321)
   

GPE har sedan början på 1970-talet haft en aversion mot kvantitativ metod; "the founding figures of radical geography included prominent defectors from the 1960s location theory and its associated mathematical methodologies (e.g. Harvey, Ron Horvath, Doreen Massey, Gunnar Olsson, Richard Peet and Edward Soja)." (s. 321) Att helt avfärda matematik är dock onödigt, säger Sheppard, och lyfter fram att han de senaste tjugo åren varit en del av"regional political economy" som kombinerat matte och GPE.

"Mathematical Marxian analyses show that macroeconomic equilibrium in a competitive capitalist economy is unstable—subject to disruption because representatives of the owners of the various factors of production (labor, money capital, land and resources) can improve their returns through political organization (i.e., class struggle). The question posed by regional political economists is whether attention to the geographies of capitalism further disrupts these assertions from ageographical economic theories. The answer, in brief, is affirmative." (s. 322)

Om Krugman och N.E.G.:

"In the spirit of August Lo¨sch, Krugman (1993) insisted that geographical economic theory focus on isotropic spaces, in order to account for the production of ‘second nature’: the morphogenesis of heterogeneous spatial economic landscapes from a uniform spatial backcloth. Geographical political economists share his concern for produced geographies, but insist that integrating already existing geographical unevenness into the analysis, again, can make a significant difference. It has been shown, for example, that markets do not function in the ways presumed by mainstream microeconomic theory in the presence of spatial heterogeneity (Sheppard et al., 1992; Sheppard et al.,1998; Plummer et al., 2011). Consider the case of retailers engaged in monopolistic spatial price competition, selling a homogeneous product to spatially dispersed consumers with delimited choice sets. First, the stability conditions of the market equilibrium are at best weak (local quasi-stability), implying that equilibria are unlikely to be observed and should not be the focus of analysis. Second, instead of maximizing total profits, firms should maximize their rate of profit on capital advanced (a result more consistent with Marxian and post-Keynesian than neoclassical theories of firm behavior; Lee, 1998)." (s. 323)

I slutsatserna diskuterar Sheppard också hur G.P.E. skiljer sig från N.E.G.:

"Geographical political economy also comes to distinct conclusions [jämfört med new economic geography]. For example, unlike invisible hand arguments, it is able to account for the persistence of socio-spatial clusters of poverty and wealth, and why these have increased in many instances under neoliberalism. Again, unlike mainstream theories of economic development, there cannot be a single, quasi-Rostowian trajectory that all territorial economies should follow (Sheppard, 2011). Since uneven geographical development always accompanies capital accumulation, differently positioned territories are motivated to seek alternative development paths, notwithstanding the beliefs of those who have prospered that others should follow what they imagine to have been their recipe for success. Put otherwise, territories’ future trajectories cannot be deduced from their place-based attributes, but are shaped just as much by their positionality within broader economic systems; their uneven connectivities with other places (greater connectedness need not reduce inequality); and their embeddedness within multi-scalar economic, political, cultural and biophysical processes (Amin, 2002; Sheppard, 2002, 2006c). " (s. 327)

Sheppard vänder sig till att diskutera specifikt tidskfriften Journal of Economic Geography, där hans essä är publicerad, och hur den kan främja dialog mellan GPE och NEG. Han menar att ett sätt är ett gemenskapt sprk: matematik. (s. 327) Ett annat är att erkänna spridningen inom de båda fälten -- att inte upprätthålla stereotyper som NEG-forskare som nyliberaler, eller ekonomernas stereotyper av GPE-forskare som "wooly headed idealists".

Referens;

Eric Sheppard (2011) "Geographical political economy", Journal of Economic Geography 11 (2011) pp. 319–33.