1. The Introduction
What are the types of the economic landscapes? What is the idealized perfectly balanced pentagonal model? What is the realistic isostasically balanced amorphous model?
2. The Exposition
The economic landscape on any given point of the time at any scale whether the local, the regional, the national or the international may be viewed from numerous perspectives. One perspective is to see whether it is a balanced or an imbalanced type of the economic landscape. Accordingly, I propose to introduce through the present textbook [Geography, Economics and Economic Geography] the two types of the economic landscapes:-
- 1) The Idealized perfectly balanced pentagonal Model/type.
- 2) The Realistic Isostasically balanced Amorphous Model/type.
3. The Models/Types
(i)The Idealized Perfectly Balanced Pentagonal Economic Landscape
An economic landscape may be said to be perfectly balanced if the people employed therein are proportionally distributed over all the 5 kinds of the economic activities: primary, secondary, tertiary, quaternary and quinary. In other words, each type of activities must engage 1/5ths of the productive population. It has to be proportional because a balanced economic scenario requires that all natural and human resources be fully utilized.
The full utilization of all resources in a given space is possible only if all the above mentioned 5 types of economic activities are undertaken. For example, the mineral resources falling under primary activities may remain unutilized, if the whole population of the given area engages only in tertiary activities (services) like clerical works and the secretarial jobs, etc. This shall naturally lead to lop sided existence of the resultant economic landscape characterized by dependence on outside areas for mineral based needs!
In fact, the idealized perfectly balanced economic landscape denotes a totally self-dependent economic landscape with little or no dependence on theoutside areas. Such an idealized landscape is likely to lead to a growth of the favorable terms of trade to the people of the region contained in it. In its idealized form, the whole world is a perfectly balanced economic landscape.
A pentagon represents perfectly this idealized state of the balanced economic landscape. All triangles P, S, T, Qa, Qu have equal area and represent equal number of productive population engaged in economic activities in the Pentagonal Economic Landscape represented by the area contained in the Pentagon a b c d e.
(ii) The Realistic Isostasically balanced Amorphous Model/Type
However, the real world is quite different from the idealized one, especially in the social sciences. Likewise, one does not find in existence in the real world the idealized perfectly balanced pentagonal economic landscape. On the contrary, deviations from the idealized model are noticed more as a rule rather than an exception.
Why are the deviations noticed? Well, the human beings on different parts of the earth's surface have different wants, desires, needs, choices and different abilities to realize the same. Thus, the economic landscape of a typical village in India shows primacy of agricultural activities, whereas a highly developed metropolitan region like that of Mumbai reflects an economic landscape consisting primarily of tertiary, Quaternary, and Quinary economic activities both representing economic landscapes in a rural and urban setting respectively.
Neither is self - sufficient. Rural economic landscape provides food grains and vegetables to the urban one, while the typical urban landscape provides to the rural one the quinary products like finances and health services.
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