Life on the Edge: A Look at Ports of Trade and Other Ecotones
| Autor: | Terrel Gallaway |
|---|---|
| Rok vydání: | 2005 |
| Předmět: |
Economics and Econometrics
Ecology Range (biology) Ecology (disciplines) 05 social sciences Ecotone General Business Management and Accounting Natural (archaeology) 0506 political science Geography Veblen good Phenomenon 0502 economics and business 050602 political science & public administration Economic anthropology Economic geography 050207 economics Diversity (business) |
| Zdroj: | Journal of Economic Issues. 39:707-726 |
| ISSN: | 1946-326X 0021-3624 |
| DOI: | 10.1080/00213624.2005.11506841 |
| Popis: | Conjunctures create opportunity. This paper examines both natural and institutional conjunctures that provide unique and valuable opportunities whose beneficiaries range from bugs to businesses. Thorstein Veblen, for example, argued that with the rise of the machine age businessmen sought gain by controlling industrial conjunctures rather than relying on unmanageable ones found in nature (1904, 17). The paper shows that ecotones are conjunctures that have been studied by ecologists, anthropologists, and economists such as Karl Polanyi. Moreover, the examination of ecotones may prove valuable to subjects as varied as economic geography, environmental economics, and economic anthropology. Ecotones and edge effects are concepts borrowed from ecology and are useful tools for analyzing a wide range of economic phenomena. Ecotones are commonly defined as the transition zone between adjacent ecosystems (Holland 1988; Gosz 1991; Bowersox and Brown 2001). 1 Wetlands, tree lines, and the meeting of savanna and desert are all examples of ecotones. Ecotones, sometimes called edges, frequently support comparatively large amounts of diversity, activity, and biomass—a phenomenon known as edge effect. 2 Part of this edge effect is accounted for by the simple fact that the ecotone supports many of the species from each of the overlapping communities. In addition, there are species “which are characteristic of and often restricted to the ecotone” (Odum 1971, 157). This paper examines the economic analog of ecological ecotones and demonstrates the usefulness of the concept in explaining the locus of economic activity as |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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