What Economic Geography Can Learn From Genetics

In genetics, sequence analyses are used to examine the sequence of base pairs in the genome of living organisms. However, sequence analyses are also increasingly being used in the social sciences to explore temporal sequences of events. A new article in the journal "Progress in Economic Geography" now shows how the method can be used to examine economic development paths.

In economic geography, it has long been recognised that it is important to consider historical developments in order to understand economic structures. Under the heading of "evolutionary economic geography", a wide range of concepts and research approaches have been developed to investigate, for example, the path dependency of developments or the ways in which regions specialise. In their article "Introducing Sequence Analysis to Economic Geography" in the journal "Progress in Economic Geography", Sebastian Losacker (University of Gießen) and Andreas Kuebart (IRS) present a new method for the direct analysis of spatio-temporal development paths. They propose the use of a set of methods collectively referred to as Geographical Sequence Analysis. The approach originates from genetics and is used to comparatively analyse sequences of base pairs in a DNA strand. Today, sequence analysis is also used in the social sciences and in education research, for example to record and compare biographical sequences (school, graduation, training, entry into the labour market, etc.) and to determine the frequencies and geographies of different sequences.

Losacker and Kuebart suggest using sequence analyses to capture and compare the developmental steps of economic areas (such as specialised clusters) and to understand the movements of entities such as companies in space as sequences. This would make it possible, for example, to identify successful and less successful development paths on the basis of typical sequence patterns, rather than only in retrospect.