Abstract
Trade geography is increasingly concerned not only with the spatial distribution of trade flows but also with how global production networks, regional development pathways, and cross-scale risks are reconfigured. Yet existing scholarship remains fragmented across theoretical traditions and spatial scales, with limited integration of relational networks, territorial conditions, and the infrastructures that sustain trade connectivity. This review traces the evolution of trade geography from comparative advantage, spatial friction, and the new economic geography to global value chains (GVCs), global production networks (GPNs), evolutionary economic geography, and relational approaches, while examining how geopolitical restructuring, supply chain resilience, digitalization, and the low-carbon transition are reshaping trade space. Three questions guide the review: how spatial heterogeneity generates trade linkages, how relational networks operate across scales, and how institutions and infrastructures mediate network restructuring and regional adaptation. Based on this synthesis, we develop a scale–relations–institutions–ecology framework linking regional capabilities, actor agency, network relations, institutional conditions, infrastructural configurations, and ecological constraints within a dynamic spatial perspective. The review shows that contemporary trade space is shaped less by a linear shift from globalization to regionalization than by the coexistence and reconfiguration of global connectivity, regional embeddedness, and reterritorialization. Digitalization and the green transition likewise transform rather than eliminate spatial frictions by introducing new digital, institutional, and ecological constraints. We further highlight methodological challenges in network de-geographization, causal identification, and balancing efficiency, resilience, and sustainability, and call for greater integration of complex networks, spatial analysis, multisource data, and agent-based modeling. The central contribution is a unified framework for explaining how scale, relational structure, institutional power, and ecological constraints jointly shape the restructuring and uneven development of global trade space, providing a theoretically grounded and empirically testable foundation for advancing contemporary trade geography.
