East Asian capitalisms and geographies of regional economies

Since the early 1980s, the core capitalist economies of North America and Western Europe have undergone fundamental transformations in their political-economic constitution and socio-spatial organization. In economic geography, these massive transformations have been described variously through such concepts as the “new industrial divide/space”, “cultural/symbolic economy”, “regional innovation systems/clusters”, and, more recently, “financialization”. While the causal origins of these four significant capitalist transformations are interrelated, economic geographers have pointed to the crisis of Fordism – previously the hegemonic form of capitalist industrial organization – and the breakdown of the Bretton Woods system of international financial management since the early 1970s as the main forces shaping the globalization of the world economy. The breakdown of Fordist mass production has dramatically reduced the economic might of older industrial areas and contributed to the emergence of flexible production systems in new industrial districts/spaces. It has also facilitated the search for new growth and capital accumulation in non-manufacturing sectors, particularly those economic activities associated with the creation of symbolic values and new knowledge. After almost two decades of intense industrial restructuring and territorial shifts, by the late 1990s, these new processes of value creation and capture had left their spatial imprints in dominant creative innovation clusters in high growth cities and regions throughout North America and Western Europe. Meanwhile, the changing international financial system during the post-Bretton Woods era has created enormous opportunities for capital accumulation that culminates in the rapid rise of global finance. As finance comes to the forefront of performing capitalism in these advanced industrialized economies, the Fordist distinction between productive assets and financial capital becomes blurred and, increasingly, morphed. This ongoing process of financialization and its crisis tendencies have profound implications for understanding the new economic geographies of the 2010s.