quaternary economic activity definition geography

These early accounts encouraged the development of transcontinental trade patterns and ushered in the era of mercantilism. The earliest travel journals included descriptions of the native people, the climate, the landscape, and the productivity of various locations. As cartography developed, geographers illuminated many aspects used today in the field maps created by different European powers described the resources likely to be found in American, African, and Asian territories. The coffee trade is a worldwide industry.Įarly approaches to economic geography are found in the seven Chinese maps of the State of Qin, which date to the 4th century BC and in the Greek geographer Strabo's Geographika, compiled almost 2000 years ago.

The name geographical economics has been suggested as an alternative. Krugman called his application of spatial thinking to international trade theory the 'new economic geography', which directly competes with an approach within the discipline of geography that is also called 'new economic geography'. Since the 1970s, two broad reactions against neoclassical approaches have significantly changed the discipline: Marxist political economy, growing out of the work of David Harvey and the new economic geography which takes into account social, cultural, and institutional factors in the spatial economy.Įconomists such as Paul Krugman and Jeffrey Sachs have also analyzed many traits related to economic geography.

Neoclassical location theorists, following in the tradition of Alfred Weber, tend to focus on industrial location and use quantitative methods. There are varied methodological approaches. There are four branches of economic geography.Įconomic geography takes a variety of approaches to many different topics, including the location of industries, economies of agglomeration (also known as 'linkages'), transportation, international trade, development, real estate, gentrification, ethnic economies, gendered economies, core-periphery theory, the economics of urban form, the relationship between the environment and the economy (tying into a long history of geographers studying culture-environment interaction), and globalization. It can also be considered a subfield or method in economics. Economic geography is the subfield of human geography which studies economic activity and factors affecting them.

Quaternary economic activity definition geography