BRINGING THE STATE BACK IN REGIONAL ECONOMICS1

Three decades ago, with the demise of regional science as a discipline, mainstream economists lost their interest in regional economics. Instead, this area was taken over by geographers and the renaissance of regional economics in 1980’s owes a great debt to them. As Storper(1997) has suggested, the contemporary contributions of geographers can be summarized in three words; technology, organization, and territoriality. Incorporating economic and social theories such as transaction cost theory, evolutionary economic theory, new economic sociology, and network analysis, geographers placed organization and technology at the centre of regional economics. In this process, territoriality was also reconceptualized as a central dimension of analysis. Though their contributions are important, one very important dimension of analysis is missing; the State. This omission is very odd because all people except regional economists seems aware that the state has impact on regional development. To make the situation more odd, geographers used to study the state as an important topic in their analysis (Dear&Gordon,?; Harvey,?). In this paper, I critically assess geographers ’ contribution to this field and attempt to put the state along with three elements mentioned earlier at the core of the analysis. 1.Geographers ’ contribution Though the beginning of the regional economics renaissance was initiated by economic historians, Piore&Sabel (), its expansion and continuity owes a great debt to geographers ’ contributions. As mentioned before, Storper(1997) summarized geographers ’ contribution in three words; technology