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as the Big Push story of development, in which firms adopt modern techniques if the market is
sufficiently large, but the market is sufficiently large if enough firms adopt modern techniques? Of
course it is; and so it was natural to carry over concepts from high development theory into economic
geography.
Page 48
Indeed, I would argue that the ideas of high development theory are more plausible in a locational
context than they are in their original habitat. The Big Push model in its original version relied crucially
on the availability of an elastic supply of labor from a low-wage rural sector; yet the wage differentials
of the surplus labor story were never really explained, merely asserted. It was possible to surmount this
difficulty by invoking very strong linkages involving intermediate goods, but even sympathetic
observers may wonder whether, given the inelasticity of factor supply that is all too likely in many
developing countries, the multiple equlibria of Big Push-type stories are really plausible.
In economic geography, however, the supply of factors to any one region or location will typically be
very elastic, because they can come from someplace else. And so while a Big Push for the economy as a
whole may be implausible, a Big Snowball for a particular region may make perfectly good sense.
Some of the authors of the classic high development tracts seem to have realized this. Certainly Myrdal
illustrated his concept of ''circular and cumulative causation" with regional examples first, and
Hirschman also liked to talk about unequal regional development within a country. The explicit
application of high development concepts to regional growth, however, is something one usually
associates with Alan Pred (1966).
file:///D|/Export2/www.netlibrary.com/nlreader/nlreader.dll@bookid=409&filename=page_48.html [4/18/2007 10:30:16 AM]