The Changing Geography of Advanced Producer Services. Theoretical and Empirical Perspectives

The service sector is the fastest growing but least studied area of modern economic geography, so many economic geographers are now turning their attention to how the so-called 'tertiary economy' operates to produce distinctive patterns of location and regional development. Producer services are those provided to enterprises rather than to individual consumers, and this book is the first to be devoted specifically to assessing their role as spatial phenomena and agents of economic and geographical change. Daniels and Moulaert approach the topic at two levels; firstly theoretical, where conventional neoclassical models of production and exchange seem to have little value in explaining service production and therefore new theoretical perspectives need to be developed and, secondly, empirical, which presents regional development histories of producer services such as accountancy, consultancy or finance, to illustrate the complexity of the geographical dimensions of the modern service company. This is a landmark book for students and researchers in geography, economics, planning and public policy.