Rebalancing the Spatial Economy: The Challenge for Regional Theory
Summary (2 min read)
1. Introduction: The Concern over Spatial
- London has a centrifugal pull on talent, investment and business from the rest of Europe and the world.
- It is not a case of holding back prosperous areas like the London--Greater South East region in order to promote activity in the less prosperous cities and regions of the country.
- And this means that there is a need to examine whether and to what extent economic, financial and political power is too concentrated in London; whether the 'economic playing field', far from being level, is too tilted in London's favour.
- The impact of the crisis in Europe, for example, has exposed major divisions between those member states inside the monetary union, and those outside; and within the Eurozone itself, between the stronger more central regions, especially in Germany, and weaker more peripheral regions, such as in Italy and Greece (Fingleton, Garretsen and Martin, 2014) .
- Spatial economic imbalances are a prominent feature of many countries, and in some cases have widened in recent years.
2. Spatial Imbalance in the UK Economy: The Rediscovery of a Long--Standing Problem
- In short, what the authors need is they need an 'evolutionary--historical geographical political economy' within which their various partial theories and explanatory schemas could be given coherence and focus.
- Rather, my aim is to stimulate debate and discussion around this issue, and hopefully others will take up the challenge.
- An encompassing 'evolutionary-historical geographical political economy' could be deployed in various ways.
- Alternatively, one could focus on just a particular region or city region, and conduct what the authors might call a 'total place' analysis, wherein they examine that region's or city's economy in all its multi--scalar detail, as a complex open system set within the relevant national and international networks and structures to which it relates and with which it interacts.
- Choosing such contrastive comparisons carefully might even give us a means of undertaking 'what--if' and 'counterfactual' type enquiries.
6. Whither Spatial Rebalancing?
- 21 The first experiment to revive the depressed northern areas of Britain was the Industrial Transference Scheme, initiated in 1928.
- This 'move workers to the work' policy sought to move unemployed workers from the structurally declining coalfields in northern regions to employment opportunities in the more prosperous south.
- As Lord Heseltine argued back in the mid--1980s, and has voiced strongly again only recently (Heseltine, 2013) , the UK's highly centralized system of Government spending and political control has long militated against the regions and cities outside London, in effect acting as a 'counter--regional policy'.
- But that political art requires a convincing and relevant conceptual and empirical foundation.
- Regional studies may have moved closer to addressing specific policy relevant issues -how to promote local clusters, regional innovation, better supply networks, and so on --but it is still at considerable remove from tackling the really big question of 'combined and uneven regional development' in their crisis--prone, globalising age.
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