The competitive advantage of regions : economic geography and strategic management intersections

Despite the growth of population and economy over the last 50 years, the world has never felt smaller. The emergence of the internet, platform-based business models, the continued rise of the multinational organization, amongst others, have advanced the ability of firms to connect economic activity across countries and regions more than ever before. Uber, for example, can operate in countries and dominate local transportation markets with virtually no physical presence or local infrastructure. Multinational organizations can locate their headquarters for tax purposes in jurisdictions that may have little connection to where they employ workers, develop technology or make sales. And the internet has enabled coalitions of interest that make it hard for national governments to respond to issues such as global climate change, systemic income inequity and divergent aspirations over liberal democratic freedoms. Although this epoch of economic history is captured astutely in the 50th anniversary edition of this journal (Turok et al., 2017), this special issue on 'The Competitive Advantage of Regions' focuses on opportunities for the fields of economic geography and strategic management to work more closely on these questions into the future.