On Concepts of Regional Economic Structure

The world of economics is apparently one of endless diversity, both in the nature of economic activity and in the economic structure of those myriads of entities which we call “economies.” The economic literature implies that this diversity is sufficiently extensive to be a dominant feature of economies, or at least intractable to successful economic analysis. Amidst this diversity, economists have been able to identify commonalities or regularities in economic structure only in the most general and non-operational terms, and have made virtually no progress towards either classifying economies into “like”, “similar” or “dissimilar” groups, of identifying a basis for measures of similarity among economies.