LAST RITES

Preamble:

Throughout this past quarter, you have been asked, prodded and challenged to think about economic geography and this class not as a collection of facts, terminological jargon, names, graphs, tables, pictures and newspaper stories, but as an extensive learning exercise in developing concepts and creating systems of linked concepts designed to help you understand present and future spatial patterns and processes of economic change. In addition, we stressed conceptual and other tools intended to prepare you for the vastly expanded access to information requiring resource skills and the ability to evaluate the quality of information.

Select one question from each part for equally weighted responses:

(Total time: 100 minutes)

Part I: (50 points/ minutes)

1. There have been many different approaches to this field called economic geography over the years, as reflected by class outlines and table of contents of textbooks.

(1) Briefly circumscribe the framework used in the class while making sure that you convince the reader that you understood the rationale for this framework, whether you agree with its use or not.

(2) Then identify and advocate the framework YOU have used to organize your ideas, insights, your excerpts from readings and other materials you have collected for the context of this class, or your Notebook as such.

(3) If your own organizing scheme coincided with that of the class, please compare or contrast the 207 framework with one which you might have preferred or which you have come across in one of your textbooks.

or

2. Complexities in real world interdependencies at local and/or global levels contribute to uncertainties and thereby affect economic activities and our own daily lives.

(1) Explain this statement, and then

(2) Suggest how different kinds of interdependence analyses (such as network-, economic base- or input/output analyses ) can contribute to the reduction of certain types of complexity and thereby uncertainty and presumably lead to more effective decision-making.

 

 

P.T.O.

 

 

PART II: (50 points/ minutes)

(1) Formulate a theoretical statement which relates to recreational location choices. For this statement, draw from the wide range of locational principles derived in class and your readings. Your own deductive reasoning and examples might also be appropriate.

or

(2) Discuss the importance of the size (by population) and nature of a region that we may select for the geographic analysis of specific economic phenomena.

[If we are interested in urban-economic phenomena, is the size of a city important? Are sizes of states, provinces, countries and multi-country trade pacts important for the analysis of interregional trade phenomena? Does the Location Quotient, the "regional" employment multiplier or the regional direct and indirect input coefficient respond to the size of the region you are investigating? Compared with smaller regions, do large regions export (relatively) more or less or are more or less dependent on outside resources (capital, know-how, etc.) or are more or less vulnerable to outside instabilities or imported inflation? Besides "size of region", can you think of other factors (variables) to consider when deciding on the region which we wish to investigate or when interpreting the results of such an investigation?]

 

BONUS: (5 points)

Explain the precise meaning of the coefficient which links the Washington state aerospace industry to other industries in the state (you find this coefficient in the column of the Aerospace industry of table of direct, indirect and induced requirements which was distributed as a handout in class).