Some remarks on the interlinked territorial scales of Marshallian external economies

The role given by Alfred Marshall to ‘places’ in industrial organization and development can be extended from a single compact centre of life and industry, such as an industrial district, to different interlinked territorial levels, much as ‘time’ in Marshall has different interlinked scales. This paper illustrates and discusses the more direct extensions, concerning the external economies accruing to industrial districts within industrial regions and larger national contexts, as well as processes and conditions that are associated with either non-local or distant trans-local contexts of “mobile” external economies. The result of such analysis is the identification of a vision which is implicit in Marshall of a multi-territorial framework of immobile and mobile external economies.