The dark side of regional industrial path development: towards a typology of trajectories of decline

Abstract

Over the past few years, scholarly debates on new path development have attracted increasing attention within the economic geography literature. This work distinguishes various trajectories of regional and industrial evolution. So far, these evolutionary trajectories have been mainly conceptualized as 'positive' forms of path development. However, in reality, many regions are undergoing phases that can be characterized as 'negative' trajectories. Despite their potentially detrimental social and political effects, negative pathways have to date largely been ignored in the extant literature. This paper seeks to shed light on the 'dark side' of path development by outlining a typology of 'pathways of decline'. Three forms of negative pathways are identified, namely path contraction, path downgrading and path delocalization. Empirical illustrations are provided for each of them.

The Decline of Tourist Destinations: An Evolutionary Perspective on Overtourism

“…Following Ma and Hassink [26], such a refined conceptualization can build on a combination of Butler's tourist area lifecycle [28] and evolutionary economic geography. To further understand processes of the growth or decline of an industry within a local or regional economy, the regional industrial path development approach of evolutionary economic geography is useful [29,[46][47][48][49][50]. The approach offers a complementary, but more elaborate, perspective on the trajectories regional or local industries might embark on.…”

“…The approach offers a complementary, but more elaborate, perspective on the trajectories regional or local industries might embark on. Following Blažek et al [29], Grillitsch et al [46], and Isaksen et al [47,48], six types of positive path development (path extension, path branching, path diversification, path creation, path importation, and path upgrading) and four forms of negative path development (path contraction, path downgrading, path dislocation, path disappearance) can be identified [29,[46][47][48][49][50]. However, the literature on path development so far does not pay specific attention to tourism.…”

“…While the latter aspects are undoubtedly important and, in reality, cannot be isolated from the evolution of the tourism sector in a narrow sense, to advance our understanding of how "overtourism" affects the evolution of tourist destinations, it makes sense to isolate the evolutionary trends that could be at play within the tourism sector of affected destinations. This article attempts to do so by further refining the trajectories at the end of Butler's tourist area lifecycle [28] and by drawing on forms of path decline recently identified in evolutionary economic geography [29], focusing these trajectories on problems prevalent in an overtourism scenario. Indeed, the usefulness of applying concepts of evolutionary economic geography to tourism has been demonstrated before [26,27].…”

Cities That Are Losing Inhabitants: An Analysis of the Brazilian Reality

“…These migrations can be triggered by several reasons such as economic transformations, the environmental consequences of urban expansion, suburbanization, and the appearance of satellite cities (Guimarães et al, 2015;Panagopoulos et al, 2015). Economic transformations include deindustrialization, economic cycles, macroeconomic trends, and globalization, among others (Guimarães et al, 2015;Blažek, Květoň, Baumgartinger-Seiringer, & Trippl, 2019).…”

Neue Entwicklungen in der geographischen Innovationsforschung

“…Pfadfortsetzung bedeutet somit Kontinuität und eben nicht Wandel. Der Niedergang von Pfaden kann sehr unterschiedliche Ursachen haben (Blazek et al 2019). Zumeist mangelt es an der Fähigkeit, radikal(er)e Formen von Innovation zu generieren.…”