economic gravity

Syllable breakdown

Dictionary meaning

a metaphor for the fundamental forces of economic scale, proximity, and mass that shape trade flows, investment patterns, and economic integration between countries and regions, analogous to the gravitational attraction between physical bodies; the gravity model of international trade — developed by Jan Tinbergen and others — predicts that trade between countries is proportional to the product of their economic sizes and inversely proportional to the distance between them; economic gravity also describes the tendency of economic activity to cluster around existing concentrations of capital, infrastructure, skills, and markets, creating self-reinforcing agglomeration effects that draw resources away from peripheral regions; the concept challenges the assumption that markets equalise economic conditions across space, showing instead that economic geography tends to produce and reproduce spatial inequalities