Geographical Bases of Economic Activities

• Economic activities are all the ways people earn a living: producing, exchanging and consuming goods and services.
  • The geography of economic activities studies their location and organisation in space. It is closely tied to the organisation of economic space.
• Every economic activity rests on two sets of bases: physical bases (what nature offers at a place) and human bases (what society brings to it).
  • The mix of the two explains why an activity happens where it does, and why the same resource is used differently in different places.
• The primary sector is the foundation. It extracts or harvests products from the Earth, such as raw materials and basic foods.
  • It includes agriculture (subsistence and commercial), mining, forestry, grazing, hunting and gathering, fishing and quarrying.
  • Secondary, tertiary, quaternary and quinary activities, the other sectors of the economy, are built on top of it.

Physical and Human Bases

Geography Optional Notes {PDF}

Complete Notes Package (Paper I & II) | 3000+ Pages | Instant Download

Discounted Price | Buy Now @ ₹1,180 →

Physical Bases of Economic Activities

• Relief and landforms set the cost of using land.
  • Plains support intensive farming, dense transport networks and cities (the Indo-Gangetic Plain, the North China Plain).
  • Mountains favour forestry, pastoralism, hydropower, mining and tourism, but raise transport costs.
• Climate decides what can be grown and when.
  • It sets crop belts: tea on the well-drained, rainy slopes of Assam and Sri Lanka; wheat in the cool, dry-winter belts of the Punjab plains and the Prairies.
  • It also shapes energy demand, tourism seasons and the working calendar of farming.
• Soils fix the natural fertility of farmland.
  • Black (regur) soils of the Deccan suit cotton; alluvium of the river plains suits rice, wheat and sugarcane.
• Water supports irrigation, industry, inland navigation and power generation.
  • Early civilisations grew in river valleys (the Nile, Indus, Tigris–Euphrates, Huang He). Today water stress is a growing limit on activity.
• Minerals and energy pull mining and heavy industry to their deposits.
  • The Ruhr coalfield in Germany and the Chota Nagpur plateau in India grew into industrial regions on coal and iron ore.
• Location as a natural endowment: coastal sites, straits and natural harbours give a place a trade advantage.
  • Singapore on the Strait of Malacca and Rotterdam at the mouth of the Rhine are examples.
• Natural vegetation and fauna support forestry, fishing and grazing: the coniferous belt of the taiga, the fishing grounds of the North Atlantic.

Human Bases of Economic Activities

• Population and labour: the size, skill and cost of the workforce.
  • Cheap, abundant labour drew garment making to Bangladesh. Skilled labour drew software services to Bengaluru.
• Capital: the money and equipment needed to start and run an activity. Mining, steel and semiconductors need very large capital.
• Technology: it turns neutral stuff into resources and raises output from the same land.
  • Greenhouse farming lets the Netherlands, a small country, rank among the world’s largest exporters of farm produce.
  • The Green Revolution turned Punjab and Haryana into India’s granary.
• Market: the size and purchasing power of consumers. Perishable and bulky products locate close to markets.
• Transport and communication: they connect raw materials, factories and markets and decide the reach of every activity.
• Government policy and institutions: tariffs, subsidies, land laws, special economic zones and infrastructure spending.
  • Shenzhen grew from a small town into a manufacturing metropolis after it became a Special Economic Zone in 1980.
• Culture, tradition and society: food habits, religion, caste occupations and entrepreneurship shape what is produced and consumed.
  • Examples include the absence of pig rearing in Muslim-majority regions and the trading communities of Gujarat and Rajasthan.
• Historical inertia: activities often stay where they began after the original advantage has gone. Old textile and steel towns show this.

Interplay of Physical and Human Bases

• Physical bases offer possibilities; human bases decide which possibility is used. This is the possibilist view of economic geography.
  • The same coalfield may stay unused in one era and grow into an industrial region in the next, once technology, capital and transport arrive.
• The weight of physical bases falls with development.
  • Hunting, gathering and subsistence farming depend closely on nature.
  • Footloose industries and services depend far more on skills, markets and connectivity.

Basic Concepts of Economic Geography

• The following concepts are studied under the geographical bases of economic activities:
  • the economic landscape;
  • the economic landscape as a dynamic, not static, element;
  • the existing landscape as a reflection of resource structure, economic processes and stage of development;
  • location and localisation of economic activities;
  • spatial functional interaction;
  • regional economic development.

The Concept of Economic Landscape

• The economic landscape is the most basic concept of economic geography.
  • It is the distinct economic character, or economic personality, of a region: the visible pattern of fields, mines, factories, markets, roads and settlements.
  • The commodities, equipment and processes of agriculture, industry, mining and trade all appear in it. The regional economic structure of an area is reflected in it.
• The term comes from the German Landschaft tradition (Wirtschaftslandschaft, economic landscape).
  • Rudolf Lütgens, the German economic geographer (Die geographischen Grundlagen und Probleme des Wirtschaftslebens, 1921), saw the determination of economic landscapes as the ultimate goal of economic geography. Its practical aim, in his view, is the most efficient human use of nature for economic ends.
  • Erich Otremba also treated the interpretation of economic landscapes as the central task of the subject.
• Because most human activity is economic, economic landscapes dominate the cultural landscape.
• Each economic landscape has a dominant activity that gives it its character:
  • industrial-commercial landscapes (the Ruhr, the Mumbai–Pune belt);
  • agricultural landscapes (the Punjab plains, the US Corn Belt);
  • mining landscapes (the Pilbara iron-ore region of Australia, the Jharia coalfield).

The Economic Landscape Is Dynamic

• The economic landscape is not static. It constantly changes and evolves.
  • It shapes current economic functions, and those functions in turn reshape it over time.
• The present landscape is the accumulated work of people in the past.
  • It is a temporary picture at one moment, produced by many interacting elements, and it is never complete.
  • Remnants of earlier landscapes survive in it: field patterns, abandoned mines, old mill towns, canal systems.
• To explain the present landscape, its systematic development, the process of transformation over time, must be studied.
  • A landscape analysed only in its present form gives an incomplete, static picture.
• Industrialisation can radically transform a landscape that was once dominated by a subsistence economy.
  • This evolutionary approach is used to explain how industries and whole economic systems develop through time.

Resource Structure, Process and Stage

• The existing economic landscape reflects three things:
  • the structure of resources, natural and human;
  • the economic processes at work;
  • the stage of economic development reached.
• This structure–process–stage trilogy is borrowed from William Morris Davis’s cycle of erosion and applied to the economic landscape.
  • Structure is the resource base: natural resources plus the human resources of skills and institutions.
  • Process is the set of activities that use the resource base, such as farming, mining, manufacturing and trade.
  • Stage is the level of development reached: youth, maturity or old age.
• Regions of economic activity pass through stages of beginning, expansion, development and maturity.
  • New activities spread and become dominant. Older ones fade but leave traces that bear witness to the earlier economy.
• Stages of economic landscapes in the world:
  • Youthful landscapes, where large-scale resource use began only recently: the interior of Brazil and much of Africa.
  • Mature landscapes, where economic growth is advanced: the USA, Canada, Russia, Australia and New Zealand.
  • Old landscapes, with a long history of resource use: Britain and much of Western Europe. Old age does not rule out further progress, as the regeneration of old industrial regions shows.
• A landscape can be rejuvenated when a new element is introduced. This happens through:
  • new populations (migrant settlers opening up a frontier);
  • the rise of a new culture or institutions;
  • new technologies of resource use, which arrive sometimes gradually and sometimes as revolutions.
  • Radical change in social and economic institutions also triggers renewal. The reform-era transformation of China after 1978 and of India after 1991 are examples.
• Economic development is therefore the outcome of resource use by people with technical knowledge. That use is selective and shaped by culture, and it differs between regions and periods.

Systematic and Spatial Organisation of Economic Activities

Location and Localisation: The Systematic Approach

• The analysis of the internal elements of an economic landscape needs another concept: the position and placement (location) of economic activities.
  • An economic landscape is a set of many activities working together in space, so their location is the central concern of economic geography.
• Location is the site of a single activity. Localisation is the concentration of an activity in a particular area: cotton textiles in Ahmedabad, diamonds in Surat, leather in Kanpur.
• Maps are the essential tool for studying the location, spread and distribution of activities.
• Geographers try to:
  • describe the location of economic activities;
  • explain their placement and distribution patterns;
  • derive general principles of location, as in the models of Von Thünen for agriculture and Weber for industry.
• The systematic (topical) approach takes one activity at a time, such as agriculture, mining, manufacturing or trade, and studies its distribution and controlling factors worldwide.
  • The regional approach takes one region and studies all its activities together. The two approaches are complementary.

Spatial Functional Interaction

• Spatial functional interaction is the mutual relationship between different economic regions. It is essential for their development.
  • In an age of large-scale specialisation, every economic activity affects and is affected by other regions and by world economic and political conditions.
  • No economic region works in isolation. The inputs for production in one region may come from a distant region, and its products may be consumed far away.
• Interaction is both horizontal, between regions at the same level, and vertical, between regions at different levels of the economic hierarchy.
  • The regional organisation of the economy emerges from countless such interactions. They are often invisible but are key geographical elements.
• Edward L. Ullman made the study of interaction the core of geographical research. He set out three conditions for it (1956):
  • Complementarity: one place has a surplus of what another place demands.
  • Intervening opportunity: a nearer source of supply cuts the flow between two distant places.
  • Transferability: the goods can be moved at an acceptable cost and time.
• Example of a functional hierarchy:
  • A farm is a basic economic unit linked to a nearby market town, which serves as its market and supply centre.
  • A factory develops in a city. Farm and factory are not directly linked, yet both interact through the urban centre that coordinates supply, trade and production.
  • The same pattern repeats from the local to the regional, national and global level and links economic landscapes worldwide.
• The intensity of interaction depends on the complexity of the economy.
  • Early economies produced little surplus and needed few transport routes or trading centres, so interaction stayed local.
  • Industrial-commercial economies build interaction networks that span the world, as global supply chains for cars or smartphones show.

Regional Economic Development

• Regional economic development is the practical side of economic geography. Its applied purpose was recognised early in the twentieth century.
• It stresses:
  • proper utilisation of resources;
  • maximum production through regional economic integration.
• A key objective of economic geography is to explain why levels of development differ between regions. This needs:
  • measurement and analysis of the different aspects of development;
  • study of resource accessibility and scarcity;
  • study of the technical and cultural factors that shape progress.
• Regional research in economic geography sets out to determine and explain the present level of development of an area and why some regions progress faster than others.
• For balanced regional development:
  • resources of different regions must be used in a linked and balanced way;
  • regional functional interaction and regional functional organisation must be strong.
• Hence regional planning for interconnected development is a vital part of modern economic geography.
  • India’s experience includes backward area planning, growth centres, and the Aspirational Districts Programme launched in 2018.