مقاله سال ۲۰۱۷

Geographical factors play a vital role in shaping the economic landscape of the world. This point, obvious to many businesspeople and politicians, has not escaped the attention of economic historians. In their effort to understand the spatial patterns of development, they emphasize not only the climate and the resource endowment of various regions, but also their locational advantage, such as the access to navigable rivers, seas, and oceans, as well as the strategic importance of straits and valleys. For example, Braudel (1972), Hicks (1969), McNeill (1974), Pirenne (1939), Pounds (1990), among others, stressed the importance of the Mediterranean sea in explaining the rise of the Greek and Roman civilizations, the economic slump of the Middle Ages, as well as the rise and fall of Italian city-states. Many of them also discussed the vital role played by a variety of trade routes, such as the Rhône valley, the Donau and Rhein rivers, and the Bosporus strait, in the development of European economic history.

Geographical factors also play a significant role in the processes of economic integration. Regional arrangements, such as the European Union and NAFTA, which effectively reduce the internal costs of trade within the blocs, are likely to have different impacts on different regions within participating countries, depending on their geographical proximity to trading partners. They are also crucial for understanding different attitudes among the member countries toward eastward expansion of the European Union. And, for many economists and political scientists who adopt the geopolitical, structuralist view of the world economy, geographical factors are crucial elements for understanding the north-south division or the emergence of “the World Economic System,” which forms the basis for their call for “the New International Economic Order.”