LECTURE 5
Quaternary Economy (Services)
Quaternary industry includes services needed
by producers such as trade, insurance, legal services, banking,
advertising, wholesaling, retailing, consulting, information
generation and real estate transactions. Such activities
represent one of the major growth sectors in post-industrial
economies and a geographical segregation seems to be developing
in which manufacturing is increasingly shunted to the peripheries
while corporate headquarters, markets and the producer-related
service activities remain in the core.
An
inherent problem in this spatial arrangement is multiplier
leakage: global corporations invest in secondary
industry in the peripheries, but profits flow back to the core
where corporate headquarters are located. As early as the
mid 1960s, American-based corporations took on an average of
about four-fifths of their net profits out of Latin America.
As a result of the multiplier leakage, the industrialization
of less developed countries actually increases the power of the
world's established industrial nations. Global corporations
are headquartered mainly in quaternary areas where the Industrial
Revolution took hold earliest-the midlatitude countries of the
Northern Hemisphere. Similarly, loans for industrial development
come from banking institutions in Europe, Japan and the U.S. with
the result that the interest payments drain the world's poorest
countries' treasuries.
Increasingly important in the quaternary
sector is the collection, generation, storage, retrieval and
processing of computerized knowledge and information including
research, consulting, publishing and forecasting. Postindustrial
society is organized around knowledge and innovation which are
used to acquire profits and exert social control. The impact
of computers is changing the world dramatically; a process that
has accelerated since 1970, with implications for the spatial
organization of all human activities and each of the five industrial
sectors. This leads to new ways of doing things and to
new products and services.
Many
quaternary industries depend on a highly skilled, intelligent,
creative and imaginative work force.
While focused geographically in the old industrial core,
the distribution of information-generating activity, if viewed
on a more local scale, can be seen to coalesce in technopoles
around major universities and research centers. The presences
of Stanford and the University
of California-Berkeley, for example,
helped make the San Francisco Bay a major center of such industry
and similar technopoles have developed near Harvard and MIT in
Boston and the tri-university (Duke, UNC,
and NC
State) Raleigh-Durham-Chapel
Hill "Research Triangle" of North Carolina. These
high-tech corridors occupy little geographic area-as a result,
the information economy is highly focused geographically contributing
to and heightening uneven development spatially.
Further Reading
Jordan-Bychkov, Terry G. and M. Domosh. The
Human Mosaic: A Thematic Introduction to Human Geography. 1999. Addison-Wesley
Education Publishers, Inc.
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