Back to the Roots of Alfred Marshall’s Industrial Organisation Analysis
Author(s)
Dimou, Michel
Abstract
Alfred Marshall’s writings on industrial organisation and location are considered as the starting point for a large body of economic theories which, in the end of the twentieth century, aimed to renew industrial and spatial economics by studying phenomena such as firm location, industrial agglomeration and labour mobility.This paper argues that Marshall’s analysis is not the beginning but rather the continuation or culmination of a classical theoretical line going back to Smith, Mill and Cairnes, built outside the traditional Ricardian paradigm. This theoretical line puts the emphasis on the appearance of a mode of industrial organisation whose efficiency is not based on free competition but rather on an alternative regime, characterised by the appearance of non-market relations between people involved in the same production and exchange processes, thus modifying the rules of economic behaviour and affecting the relative value of produced goods. This set of writings has left some interesting tools for economic analysis, among which we can find the concepts of non-competing group and economic nation; they both appear as the archetypes of the Marshallian industrial district.
