Examining the evolution of the tertiary sector: economic geography of knowledge

• Autores: Alexandra López Cermeño
• Directores de la Tesis: Carlos Santiago Caballero (dir. tes.), Joan R. Rosés Vendoiro (dir. tes.)
• Lectura: En la Universidad Carlos III de Madrid ( España ) en 2016
• Idioma: inglés
• Tribunal Calificador de la Tesis: Andrés Rodríguez Pose (presid.), Alexandre Klein (secret.), Kerstin Enflo (voc.)
• Programa de doctorado: Programa Oficial de Doctorado en Historia Económica
• Materias:
  • Geografía
    • Geografía económica
  • Historia
    • Historias por especialidades
      • Historia de la economía
• Enlaces
  • Tesis en acceso abierto en: e-Archivo
• Resumen

  • Economic historians tend to focus on the contrast between manufacturing and agriculture to explain development gaps, underestimating the increasing role of services that has been only marginally explored. This study provides a long-term view on geographical localization patterns of services in the USA during the 20th century, with a special focus on the knowledge intensive sector. It expands the traditional debate regarding the localization theory in the context of the service economy and provides a new dataset that delivers geographically accurate results at the level of counties. The thesis adds new quantitative evidence to the pre-existing literature on the service economy, showing an increasing and disproportional agglomeration of skilled workers in big urban areas that exacerbates the differentials between rural areas and metropolises. This trend is statistically significant at the level of counties, and possibly overlooked if broader geographical units are used. This evidence favors the New Economic Geography theory by showing a causal, positively significant and increasing impact of market size on the disproportional allocation of not only knowledge intensive services, but almost any non-agricultural economic activity, pointing at the incompatibility between increasing returns to scale and activities requiring an intensive use of land. This impact seems to be simultaneously constrained by the failure of agricultural production, unveiling that good preconditions for agricultural success prevent the development of the service economy through the persistence of agricultural agglomeration. This persistence however can be fought: evidence shows that an external shock (i.e., a new university) will not only have a positive impact on the local economy, but also on nearby counties. Moreover, the local human capital shock positively affects the whole nation while making foreign competitors worse-off. Results are persistent in the long run, although the strength of these shocks dilutes over distance and time. Such evidence points to the service economy as being the driver of regional gaps in the 20th century, effectively strengthening its importance for local and national policy-makers.