Anne Van Der Veen
University of Twente, Public and Social Administration, Enschede, The Netherland
Henriette S. Otter
University of Twente, Public and Social Administration, Enschede, The Netherland
Keywords:
regional economics, scales and aggregation, emergent spatial structures.
Abstract
Economists have devoted more attention to the scale of time than to the scale of space. What has been done in the field of space is often general and abstract, not connected to an explicit observation set in time and space. Moreover, time scales and spatial scales are not tied, making the choice for a macro, meso or microeconomic theory a rather arbitrary process. We devote attention to the explanation of the phenomenon of emerging spatial structures. We will discuss the standard economic theories that describe the underlying processes and argue that by being more explicit about spatial scales explanatory power is added to current theoretical work.
