Geographies of International Trade: Theory, Borders, and Regions

As old as civilization itself, international trade is fundamentally important to the economic wellbeing of nations and their regions. As with any other economic activity, international trade has a geography. Despite this geographic nature of international trade, it is a relatively unexplored topic by economic geographers. This is not to say that economic geographers do not investigate international economic activity, only that they do not study the more general processes of international trade. In this paper, I review three facets of international trade that imply the importance of geography undertaken by economists and geographers: theory, borders, and regions. Recent theoretical research implicates the importance of geography as an integral component of trade theory; the political geography of trade (borders) is shown to have differential effects in different regions; and the formation of regional trading blocs reveals that geography is still important for understanding international relationships. All three of these facets are fundamentally geographical. It is argued here that the discipline of economic geography must broaden its scope in order to apply a geographical imagination to the understanding of international trade.