ABSTRACT
This edited collection was first proposed to Gary Cook in the autumn of 2014 by Routledge Commissioning Editor Terry Clague. Cook’s own journey in exploring the interface between Economic Geography (EG) and International Business (IB) and the connections he has forged with the other editors of this volume (and many of the contributors) shed light on the many areas for fruitful interaction between the two disciplines and, more broadly, with economics and management. Cook and Pandit were contemporaries on the PhD programme at Manchester Business School and, indeed, shared the same PhD supervisor, Tony Cockerill, and have a common background in Industrial Economics. In 1996 they embarked on a stream of work, which continues to the current day into industrial clusters, in the first case in connection with a European Commission Funded project led by Peter Swann. Their initial work was a large scale econometric analysis of the links between cluster strength and firm growth rates and the prospects for surviving new firm start-ups, focusing on the Financial Services and Broadcasting industries. The positive correlations were strongly evident. The choice of sectors was not random. An important question – and one which finds some echoes in this Companion – is whether patterns evident in manufacturing industries would also be found in service industries. In broad outline, results were very consistent with those found in parallel projects on computing, biotechnology and aerospace.
