Fair Trade for All: How Trade Can Promote Development
Germany. Therefore a reflection about the extent to which case study results can actually be generalized or used as guidance in different contexts, about their contribution to the field and about the main techniques and approaches used would have been a good addition to this volume. As with most edited books, the Economic Geography of Innovation also has some problems of internal inconsistency. These however, do not relate to the quality of the articles that remains high throughout the book, but mainly with their assumptions about which factors influence the capability of regions to generate innovation. Some articles, for instance, reproduce a recurrent misconception on the field: that regions innovate and compete. It is true that regions (or countries) may compete for some resources but the type of competition that is mentioned here is exclusive of firms. Therefore it does not make sense to say that a region must be competitive and innovative. What the region must do is create the conditions to facilitate its firms to do both these things. This recurrent mistake has a direct impact on policies: when policy makers are more concerned on developing networks and reinventing the narratives about their region they are missing the key point that in the end what matters is the ability of entrepreneurs, managers, and workers, of private and/or public firms to have new ideas, put them into practice, market them, and with that increase their living standards and those of the wider population.