Mick Dunford

Catching Up or Falling Behind? Economic Performance and Regional Trajectories in the "New Europe"*

Abstract This paper examines the trajectories of economic development of European national and regional economies in light of the pressures for greater integration and enlargement of the European Union. Using a variety of data sets, we demonstrate that there are significant variations in the speed and direction of change in per capita income and in productivity and employment rates across countries and a sample of European regions, and that falling behind (divergence) occurs as well as catching up (convergence). Making sense of spatial development therefore requires, we argue, that attention be paid to processes of differentiation and, in particular, to the falling behind experienced by less developed areas in East Central Europe and the forging ahead of the most developed, as well as to processes of catch-up. The paper also contributes to an assessment of the appropriateness of interpretations of growth and spatial development through countering the dominant discourse of convergence in neoclassical and neoliberal formulations and by suggesting that integration brings with it a number of important territorial “costs” associated with increasing inequality.

Winners and Losers The New Map of Economic Inequality in the European Union

This article examines some of the main features and causes of the changing geography of inequality and unequal development in the European Union (EU). The main spatial inequalities in the EU and the wider Europe are outlined, as are some of the trends in regional inequality since the early 1960s and their relation to economic performance. Considerable emphasis is placed on evidence of the dysfunctionality of wide inequalities for economic development, and it is argued that a neo-liberal programme of market integration and an intensification of competition for investment creates a zero-sum gain in which the gains of the winners are often at the expense of the losers. An initial attempt is made to identify some of the winners and losers of the late 1970s and 1980s and to identify some of the factors that help explain why some regions were more successful than others.

Metropolitan Polarization, the North-South Divide and Socio-Spatial Inequality in Britain A Long-Term Perspective

Spatial inequalities have been a constant feature of capitalist development in Britain. Today there are two major macro-geographical divides. The first is between the Greater London metropolitan area and the rest of Britain. The second is a related division between North and South which assumed particular prominence after the inter-war depression when the industries of the old industrial heartland went into decline. Attention is paid first to a variety of social, economic and political indicators of these persistent divisions and of the more complex mosaic of in equality that underlies them. An attempt will be made to explain the evolution of these divisions via refer ence to some of the underlying structures specific to British capitalism, the deep-seated process of relative economic decline that dates from the late nineteenth century, the dynamics of the post-war boom and the impact of the neo-liberal, two-nations accumulation strategy of the Thatcher era which saw a regionally differentiated process of de-industrialization in 1979- 83 followed by a speculative, service industry-led boom and a service-led recession after 1989. To con clude I shall try to identify the relationships between inequality and economic dynamism, focusing in par ticular on the contradictory character of inequality.

Port-industrial complexes

This article starts with a definition of ports as gateways with facilities for receiving and transferring passengers and cargo between water and land transport and emphasizes the role in port and industrial zones of a set of interrelated industrial activities. Emphasis is also placed on the role of ports as steps in commodity or value chains and as vital elements of logistic systems. Attention is then paid to investment in port facilities and competition among ports to control their hinterlands and to serve market areas and to the impact of shifts in the center of gravity of economic activities on the evolution of the global ports system. The next section deals with the development in the 1960s and 1970s of maritime industrial development areas and their relationship to the restructuring of industries producing intermediate goods, of maritime transport and seaport systems (including the growth of containerization), and the active interventionism of corporatist governments. A number of these projects were adversely affected by the economic crises of the 1970s and 1980s, although the case of Gioia Tauro indicates how an earlier planning disaster laid the foundations for the largest container port in the Mediterranean. In recent decades, globalization and increased international trade have seen ports emerge as centers of industrial agglomeration and as vital logistic hubs in the activities of transnational corporations (TNCs). These developments are examined in relation to the rise of Hong Kong and Mainland China and the complementary investments in Europe and the United States. This article concludes with an account of some of the complex mechanisms (of privatization, collective action, and supranational regulation) shaping the rationalization and run-down of smaller ports, taking the examples of Newhaven and Dieppe on either side of the English Channel.

The Restructuring of the Post-war British Space Economy

Our aim is to outline some of the principal changes in the regional geography of the UK since 1945. At the root of the restructuring of its geography is a continuously changing functional and spatial differentiation of the process of social reproduction. In complex societies the process of social reproduction is split up into a large number of functionally differentiated activities. At the same time a territorial division of labour is established in which (1) different branches of production or particular phases in the production of a single commodity, good or service are confined to particular districts of a country, and (2) a variety of aggregated regional complexes of intra- and interregionally interdependent functions of production, distribution, circulation and consumption are established (see Lapple and van Hoogstraaten, 1980, pp. 117–32; Dunford and Perrons, 1983, pp. 352–7; and Marx, Capita, vol. 1, pp. 470–80).

The Economics of Rising Inequalities. Edited by Daniel Cohen, Thomas Piketty, and Gilles Saint-Paul

In the past two decades, most developed capitalist countries have experienced strong increases in inequality. A result of a mid1990s research project mounted by the Centre for Economic Policy Research and the Instituto de Estudios Economicos de Galicios, this volume brings together a number of theoretical and econometric studies whose goal is to clarify the nature of these recent increases in inequality and to identify some of the factors that explain them. The contributors deal with two sets of issues that are likely to interest an economic geography audience. First, in some of the chapters, it is recognized that there are several sources of income inequality. Of particular importance is the distinction between the impact of transitory variations in individual income over an individual’s life, on the one hand, and variations in lifetime incomes, on the other. These sources of income inequality are affected in different ways by factors that are related to life cycles and household structures, the distribution of earnings, and government redistribution. Each factor is considered, although the greatest attention is paid to earnings and the functioning of the labor market or the role of redistribution and welfare. Second, in a way that parallels questions that are asked in economic geography, a major aim is to identify the respective roles of underlying economic fundamentals and institutional factors: to what extent, for example, is the more dramatic recent increase in inequality in Anglo America relative to continental Europe a result of institutional differences? Although these two sets of mechanisms are associated with identifiable sources of variation, there are often, as a number of contributors show, important interactions between them as market forces respond to institutional factors, and vice versa. The book is divided into two parts. The first part deals with markets and institutions. In the first chapter, Bover, Bentolila, and Arellano discuss the relationships among earnings inequality, trade union power, and unemployment in Spain. They argue that unions compress wage inequalities as the returns paid for skills, measured simply by the level of educational attainment, is greater in less unionized sectors of the Spanish economy, while firm-level agreements raise the returns to skills in line with productivity. The rise in inequality is therefore due, in part, to the decline of union power and the decentralization of wage bargaining. Unemployment also plays a role, however. The authors argue that in periods of sustained high unemployment, skills are lost. As a result, there is a change in the relative supply of skilled and unskilled labor, and the returns to skills increase. Cantó, Cardoso, and Jimeno compare Spain and Portugal. Portugal has a much lower rate of unemployment than does Spain. The Portuguese labor market is considered more flexible than that of Spain (although, the minimum wage is higher relative to the average wage in Portugal than in Spain so that the impact of institutional factors is less clear-cut). As expected, Portugal consequently has higher earnings inequality than does Spain: most striking is a negative wage gap in textiles and hotels and restaurants, suggesting that low-skill labor-intensive sectors survive in Portugal but not in Spain, where higher low-skilled wages raise unemployment. Acemoglu argues that increasing wage inequality may stem from changes in the composition of jobs. Central is an increase in the demand for skilled labor either as a result of changes in technology/specialization or, more strikingly, of increases in the #1753—ECONOMIC GEOGRAPHY—VOL. 80 NO. 4—80411-dunford_br

Structural change, theories of regulation and regional development

The geography of any locality is an expression of natural and social processes of change. Any given territory both shapes the specific nature of social, economic and political change as it takes place and is itself shaped by such changes. There is, in other words, a dialectical relationship between society and space and between economic, social and political change and territorial development change.