国际贸易地理.docx

Map of the World
l Questions Geography asks:
- “Where?” questions (descriptive inventory)
Where are things located?
What is their distribution across the surface of the earth?

- “Why?” and “How?” questions (analytical approach)
Why are things located where they are?
How do different things relate to one another at a specific place?
How do different places relate to each other?
How have geographic patterns and relationships changed over time?

- What is geography? (a more academic definition)
It is concerned with place, describes the changing pattern of places, and attempts to unravel the meaning of the evolving of such patterns.
It seeks to understand the physical and cultural features of places and their natural settings on the face of the earth.
The spatial dimension is central to geography.
It uses a distinctive language – the language of maps.

☺Part VI – the most insightful & enlightening part this table provides:
Geography helps us to understand the world, the earth as it was, its past tense, to explore the world as it is, its present tense, and to think of the world as it might be, its future tense.
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The Carnegie Report on Higher Education (1991) sets forth the almost certain dangers that exist in the global future if we fail to see the world as thus:
The world has become a more crowded, more interconnected, more volatile and more unstable place. If education cannot help students see beyond themselves and better understand the interdependent nature of our world, then each generation will remain ignorant, and its capacity to live competently and responsibly will be dangerously diminished. (p.42)

l Maps
1. Some fundamental concepts of space and location
1) Properties of space
Geographers consider various dimensions of space:
One-dimensional space,
Three-dimensional space,
Two-dimensional space that can be represented on a plane,
The spatial elements of point, line, and area may be used to define the basic geographic concepts of distance, direction, and connectivity.

2) Two kinds of location
Absolute location (site) is position in relation to a conventional grid system, such as latitude and longitude or street addresses;
Relative location (situation) is position with respect to other locations. It is a measure of connectivity and accessibility, and it usually changes over time.
The concept of relative location is of greater interest to economic geographers than absolute location.

2. The language of maps
Cartographers & Cartography – a graphic portrayal of location
1) Scale
2) Parallels of Latitude & Meridians of Longitude
Both latitude and longitude are measured in degrees, minutes, and seconds.
F Equator – a latitude of 0°
All other latitudinal lines are parallel to the equator and to each other and therefore are called parallels. Every point on a given parallel has the same latitude.
Places north of the equator are in north latitude; or v.s. south latitude.
The North Pole is 90°N; the South Pole 90°S.
Places near the equator are in low latitude; Places near the poles, high latitude.
The Tropic of Cancer, at 23.5°N, and the Tropic of Capricorn, at 23.5°S.
The Arctic Circle, at 66.5°N, and the Antarctic Circle, at 66.5°S.
Places between tropic and circle lines are said to be in middle latitude.
F Meridian of Greenwich or prime meridian – a longitude of 0°
Meridians of longitude are straight lines connecting the poles. Every meridian is drawn due north and south. They converge at the poles and are farthest apart at the equator.
Places east (west) of the prime meridian are in east (west) longitude.
The meridian of 180°, exactly half way around the world from the prime meridian, is the other dividing line between places east and west of Greenwich.
F The combination of latitude and longitude give us absolute location.

3. Our Globe
F Northern Hemisphere contains the bulk of the world’s land and most of the principal centers of population and industry, it therefore is called the “land hemisphere”, constitutes 80% of the world’s total land area and has approximately 91% of the world’s population.
F Southern Hemisphere, or “water hemisphere”, has only 20% of the land and 9% of the population.

4. Different maps, different standings, & different perspectives of the world
Center & Margin, or Core & Periphery (ethnocentrism)

l The Field of Geography
- Geography as a synthesizing discipline
- Geography of International Trade
In the case of this course, it focuses upon one of the world’s most important economic activities, the international trade, and therefore, it falls within the scope of economic geography.

- Trends in Economic Geography
Economic geography is concerned with the spatial organization and distribution of economic activity, the use of the world’s resources, and the distribution and expansion of the world economy.

Commercial geography developed during the era of European exploration and discovery from the 15th century through the 19th century:
British scholar G. G. Chisholm (1899)
His stated purpose of commercial geography – to stimulate intellectual interest in geographic facts relating to trade;
Hence, his book was an inventory of commodity and trade statistics, his approach was more descriptive than analytical.

Economic geography was affected by 3 major themes of geography:
1) Human-environmental relations (flourished until 1930s),
environmental determinism – Climates, disease, or even the “colored races” are some of the determinants used to justify economic activities.

2) Areal differentiation (influential from the late 1930s to the late 1950s),
Adopting the view that all geographic phenomena were unique and that theory building was of little value;
Areal differentiation – differences rather than similarities – among places, resulted in detailed descriptions of production, exchange, and consumption with voluminous factual data in some of the great regional writing, overlooking the need for comparative studies. Areal differentiation dominated geography at the expense of areal integration.

3) Spatial organization (now the dominant approach).
How space is organized by individuals and societies to suit their own designs; Framework for analyzing and interpreting location decisions and spatial structures;
The majority of research in economic geography today remains location theory and analysis. It aims to understand “what” products and services are produced and “how” they are produced (i.e. with what combination of resources), as well as “where” they are produced and “why there?” The theme of spatial organization is particularly valuable in helping us to understand world development problems.

Population and the World Economy

l Population Problems in the World Today

ü The study of population is critically important for 3 reasons:
1. More people are alive at this time – 6 billion – than at any point in Earth’s long history.
2. The world’s population increased at a faster rate during the 2nd half of the 20th century than ever before in history.
3. Virtually all global population growth is concentrated in less developed countries (LDC).

ü To study the challenge of increasing the food supply, reducing pollution, and encouraging economic growth, geographers must ask where and why a region’s population is distributed as it is.
1. where is the world’s population distributed?
2. where has the world’s population increased?
3. why is population increasing at different rates in different countries?
4. why might the world face an overpopulation problem?
Geography’s focus on answering the where and why questions helps to explain the global population problem and to suggest solutions.

ü the world’s overpopulation problem
1. Overpopulation problem from the perspective of globalization:
This problem is not simply a matter of the total number of people on Earth, but the relationship between the number of people and the availability of resources.
Problems arise when an area’s population exceeds the capacity of the environment to support them at an acceptable standard of living.
2. Overpopulation problem from the perspective of local diversity:
Overpopulation is a threat in some regions of the world but not in others. Some regions have a favorable balance between people and available resources, while others do not. Further, the regions with the most people are not necessarily the same as the regions with an unfavorable balance between population and resources.

l Population Distribution
1. Population size and population concentrations
6 billion people;
3/4 of the world’s population live on only 5% of Earth’s surface (which consists of oceans and less intensively inhabited land);
The world’s population is clustered in 5 regions: East Asia, South Asia, Southeast Asia, Western Europe, and Eastern North America. And these 5 regions display some similarities:
ü Most of their people live near an ocean, or near a river with easy access to an ocean, rather than in the interior lands. E.g. the Pacific coast, Huang and Yangzi River valleys, the coastlines of the Arabian Sea and the Bay of Bengal (孟加拉湾), the plains of Ganges river (恒河)，Indo-china, the Atlantic coast of North America, the Great Lakes, etc.
ü They occupy generally low-lying areas (mid-latitude esp.), with fertile soil and temperate climate. They are all located in the Northern Hemisphere between 10° and 50°N, with the exception of part of the Southeast Asia concentration.

2. Sparsely populated regions
Certain physical environments have some influences on permanent human settlement. Relatively few people live in regions that are too dry, too wet, too cold, or too mountainous for activities such as agriculture:
ü Dry lands
Lands deficient in moisture are sparsely settled. The largest desert region, extending from North Africa to Southwest and Central Asia, is known by the Sahara, Arabian, Takla Makan, and Gobi deserts.
By constructing irrigation systems, people can survive by growing crops (Oasis).
Dry lands may contain natural resources useful to people – notably, much of the world’s oil reserves.

ü Wet lands
Equatorial heat and moisture, as in the Congo and Amazon basins, appear to deter settlement. Too much rainfall (precipitation) and heat rapidly deplete nutrients from the soil, thus hindering agriculture.

ü Cold lands
Few people live in very cold regions, such as northern Canada, arctic Russia (Siberia), and northern Scandinavia.
The polar regions receive less precipitation than some desert areas, but over thousands years the small annual snowfall has accumulated into thick ice (permafrost ground).

ü High lands
Relatively few people live at high elevations. The highest mountains in the world are steep, snow-covered, and sparsely settled, such as Mount Everest, Alps.

3. Population Density
The measures of density help geographers to describe the distribution of people in comparison to available resources.
ü Arithmetic density
The total number of people divided by total land area;
Arithmetic density answers the “where” question, enabling geographers to make comparisons of the number of people trying to live on a given piece of land in different regions of the world.

ü Physiological density
Land suited for agriculture is called arable land. In a region, the number of people supported by a unit area of arable land is called the physiological density.
The higher the physiological density, the greater is the pressure that people may place on the land to produce enough food. Hence, such density measure provides insights into the relationship between the size of a population and the availability of resources in a region. (eg. US vs. Egypt)

ü Agricultural density
The ratio of the number of farmers to the amount of arable land;
This measure helps explain economic differences. Most Developed Countries have lower agricultural densities because technology and finance allow a few people to farm extensive land areas and feed many people.

þ To understand the relationship between population and resources in a country, geographers examine its physiological and agricultural densities together.
F Look at Table 2-1:
Egypt and Netherlands: the physiological densities of both Egypt (2147) and the Netherlands (1450) are high, but the Dutch (58) have a much lower agricultural density than the Egyptians (737). That means that both the Dutch and Egyptians put heavy pressure on the land to produce food, but the more efficient Dutch agricultural system requires many fewer farmers than does the Egyptian system.

India and Netherlands: the Netherlands (1450) has a much higher physiological density than does India (556), but a much lower agricultural density. This shows that the Dutch have extremely limited arable land to meet the needs of their population (they built dikes and created polders圩田，围海造田). However, the highly efficient Dutch farmers can generate a large food supply from a limited resource. (Dutch Lady, no Egyptian Lady, J)

l Where has the world’s population increased?
1. Measures of population change
ü Crude birth rate (CBR):
The total number of live births in a year for every 1000 people alive in the society; A CDR of 20 means that for every 1000 people in a country, 20 babies are born over a 1-year period.

ü Crude death rate (CDR):
The total number of deaths in a year for every 1000 people alive in the society.

ü Natural increase rate (NIR): NIR (%) = CBR - CDR
The percentage by which a population grows in a year.
e.g. NIR = CBR (20) – CDR (5) = 15 per 1000 = 1.5%
“Natural” means a country’s growth rate excludes migration.
During the 1990s, the world natural increase rate was 1.5, meaning that world population grew each year by 1.5%.
This rate affects the doubling time, which is the number of years needed to double a population, assuming a constant rate of natural increase. At the current NIR of 1.5% per year, world population would double in about 50 years.

2. Distribution of natural increase of world’s population
ü Distribution of natural increase rate:
It shows very large regional differences. The NIR exceeds 3.0% in a number of countries in central Africa, the Middle East, and Central America. At the other extreme, the NIR rate is 0% or even negative in much of Europe, meaning that their population is actually declining in the absence of immigrants.

ü Distribution of population growth:
All the growth is concentrated in poorer countries. Over the past 3 decades, about 54% of the world’s population growth has been in Asia,
15% each in sub-Sahara Africa and the Middle East,
10% in Latin America;
Europe and North America each account for only 3% of global population growth.

þ Regional differences in NIR mean that virtually all the world’s additional people live in th