2003-12-17
COMPETITIVIDADE REGIONAL. Um aspecto no catálogo de 2004 da Edward Elgar Publishing sobre "industrial economics" que salta de imediato à vista é o preço dos livros. Exorbitante! De outra forma seria também muito difícil editar livros como os apresentados, destacando-se, por exemplo, uma secção interessante de títulos sobre economia e gestão do conhecimento. Há, contudo, dois livros que gostaria aqui de destacar. Trata-se de From Industrial Districts to Local Development: An Itinerary of Research, de G. Becattini, M. Bellandi e G.D. Ottati, saído em 2003. "From Industrial Districts to Local Development introduces a set of papers representing the main contribution of the ‘Florence school’ to the recent literature on industrial districts. The authors illustrate that the revitalisation of the concept of industrial districts, returning to Alfred Marshall’s nineteenth-century writings, is rooted in an unconventional interpretation of the economic development of Tuscany after the Second World War. Models of industrial organisation and empirical investigation of industrial tendencies are featured, and Alfred Marshall’s concepts of the advantages of the geographical agglomeration of specialised small firms in industrial districts are reintroduced. The authors extend the analysis of purely economic effects of agglomeration, including social, cultural and institutional foundations of local development, and current case studies are presented." Dentro desta mesma área, uma perspectiva mais anglo-saxónica é proposta por B. Johansson, C. Karlsson e R. R. Stough, que editaram em 2002 o título Regional Policies And Comparative Advantage. "This book analyses the conception of economic development in modern regions, which has gone through a fundamental change since the early 1980s. Regions are today increasingly looked upon as independent market places that are connected via interregional and international trade and not as administrative units embodied in a national state. Two complementary theoretical frameworks explain the specialization of economic activity at the regional level. The traditional approach assumes that the comparative advantages of regions depend upon differences in the supply of lasting resources. In contrast the new complementary framework called the New Economic Geography, assumes that the dynamic interaction between geographical market potentials and rational firms in its own way creates the comparative advantage of regions. The contributors to this book examine the policy implications of the complementarity of the competing views in a variety of geographic and functional contexts. The first set of papers examines the effect of regional policy on firm locational decision-making. This leads to another set evaluating a variety of regional policy efforts. New and different methodological approaches are examined in another set of papers. The final part of the book focuses on new concepts."
