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Conflicts over territorial politics are intimately bound up with issues of class representation in national politics. The thesis of this paper is that the persistence of British regional policy, with support from both major parties of government over a period of forty years or more, reflects an attempt to maintain the class-based dual party system of national politics by minimising the importance of other dimensions of political preference. The paper has two main sections. In the first a series of conventional rationales for regional policy are examined in terms of efficiency, equity, and the government's interest in reelection, and it is concluded that none of these adequately explains the uncontested basis of British regional policy. In the second main section a version of Downs's model of electoral competition is adopted to investigate the stability of forms of two-party competition, and it is argued that in a class-based national system the parties have a strong interest in avoiding the emergence of a separate territorial dimension of politics. The conclusion to the paper is a consideration of the relationship between regionalism, regional politics, and regional policy in the context of Mrs Thatcher's government's weakening of regional policy and emphasis on strong central control.

In this paper the sources of distributed lags, involving both positive and negative lead and lag terms, in the relationship between local and national unemployment series are analysed. First, the elements of labour supply and demand from which local unemployment changes result are considered, with emphasis on the role of induced labour migration. Second, the consequences of the arithmetical relationship between local and national unemployment series are examined. It is shown that the national-local unemployment relationship should be nonlinear and the lag distribution should be dependent on the level of unemployment. More explicit recognition of causal relationships is necessary if substantive conclusions are to be drawn from statistical analyses of lag structures.

Recent studies have provided evidence that distance-deterrence parameters may vary between areas even in doubly constrained spatial interaction models. In particular, it has been suggested that distance effects may be stronger for less accessible origins or destinations. This paper considers possible explanations for such variation. It is argued that explanations in terms of 'map pattern' alone are inadequate and that more substantive explanations are required in relation to the economic assumptions of the standard spatial interaction model. Four potentially variable parameters in this model are distinguished and three specific hypotheses to account for the observed pattern are outlined. These involve a real income effect, scale economies in transport costs, and the spatial concentration of specialised functions.

A recent paper by Pitfield (1978) concluded from an analysis of freight flows, employing a range of tests, that there was no means of predicting whether a linear-programming solution or a gravity model provided the better approximation to an actual flow matrix. However, it can be shown theoretically that the gravity model should always be at least as good as the linear-programming solution. The source of Pitfield's inconsistent results is traced and it is argued that plural tests should be used to identify specification errors rather than to promote agnosticism.

This paper tests a number of hypotheses relating commodity values, relative transport costs, and the severity of distance deterrence, by use of data from a survey of consignment movements to and from industrial establishments. The basic results confirm the significance of the value–weight ratio in determining variations between commodities. The relationship is much weaker than hypothesised, however, which implies that transport accounts for only a small fraction of distance costs. Further analyses point to the importance of factors associated with the particular plants concerned, such as size of firm or regularity of demand.

In this paper a new theoretical framework and supporting empirical evidence on the relationship between movement probabilities and length of stay are presented. Individuals' evaluations of the relative value of alternative locations are assumed to evolve stochastically, with a possible tendency either to cumulative inertia or to cumulative stress. In general this yields a nonmonotonic duration function, with probabilities of movement starting at zero, rising and then falling—a pattern consistent with either cumulative tendency, or neither. A version of the model fitted to data on household movement intentions, from the UK General Household Survey, confirms the hypothesised form of this function and indicates a dominance of cumulative stress over cumulative inertia.

This paper develops an approach to the analysis of labour markets in a metropolitan region, emphasising the interdependencies between submarket areas arising from housing-related as well as employment-related migration and from induced shifts in commuting patterns. Three distinct migration streams with differing sensitivity to distance are identified and separately incorporated in a simultaneous equation model in which employment growth, unemployment, house construction, and house prices are also endogenous. Results are presented for estimation of this eleven-equation model with cross-sectional data for seventy-one areas in inner London, outer London, and the Outer Metropolitan Area. Important linkages are identified between the availability of rentable accommodation, labour migration and thus unemployment, between long-distance migration, and rates of private construction both in the areas of original destination and subsequent dispersal, and between intrametropolitan housing-related moves and the consequent decentralisation of employment. The distribution of new housing and employment opportunities, more than residential preference, is seen as the key factor in locational change within the region.