Economic Integration and Transport Infrastructure in the Baltic Sea Area

Abstract

Until the recent wave of theoretical economic geography, the mainstream foreign trade theory — and the theory of economic integration in particular — did not care about space. Neither the internal spatial structure of integrating national economies nor their respective geographical location had any importance for potential gains and losses of different forms and institutional arrangements of economic integration. Besides this mainstream there is a special German tradition disseminated by Lösch (1962) and Predöhl (1949) putting international trade and economic integration into a spatial perspective. Predöhl was convinced that integration areas can not be formed ad libidum by political decisions, but that there is a spontaneous spatial process at work forming natural integration areas with their respective “centres of gravity”. One can reap the gains from integration if policy supports this spontaneous process, while integration policy is bound to fail if it tries to form non-natural blocks. As Predöhl’s student in Münster, Karin Peschel became “obsessed” by this idea of looking at the world economy as a spatial system. “Economically high integrated areas” or “economic spaces”, for short, became a leitmotiv of her research.

Article Footnote

Financial support by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft for the project “Wie wirken sich neue Verkehrstechnologien und die Entwicklung Transeuropäischer Netze auf die Europäische Standortverteilung aus?” is gratefully acknowledged.