why does economiats use maps
Answers
✨YOUR QUESTION'S ANSWER✨
there is a plethora of tools out there. getting back to my answer: "It depends" if the economist has been trained in using them and knows how to interpret the results. The previous statement is not a critique, but a view that comes from my background, which is quite strange. I have a master level education from an Italian University and a PhD in GIS from another Italian University.
In my experience I can tell you that it also depends form the field of expertise of the economist, as i previously mentioned. If you are interested in the effect on human activities and environment of an economic activity for example (sorry the very lame example), you might want to analyse and map, at least, your variables of interest collected at areal unit level and distributed through a shapefile (still a legacy file format from the early ages of GIS).