Suchergebnisse

During the 1950s and 1960s, it seemed that our understanding of regional growth processes had progressed far enough for confident policy prescriptions to be advanced. From the vantage point of the 1980s, that assurance seems to have been misplaced. The paper contains a review of the debate on regional growth processes and the policy implications, in the context first of Britain and then more generally. It is shown that there has been a strong move away from the advocacy of traditional redistributive, and essentially zero-sum, policies to the view that intraregional policies to foster the supply potential are more appropriate. This shift in emphasis is partly attributable directly to the current high rates of unemployment. Probably more important has been the associated emergence of the monetarist/supply-side challenge to Keynesian demand-management orthodoxy. This macroeconomic debate is briefly reviewed and the implications for regional policy indicated. In the concluding section, an outline is provided of the supply-side approach to regional development that seems relevant for the foreseeable future, not as a replacement for traditional redistributive policies but as a necessary, and hitherto somewhat neglected, complement.

The 1984 regional policy package is expected to save £300 million per annum compared with previous arrangements. An attempt is made to itemise the sources of this saving. It can be seen from the results that it is hard to reconcile the various stated expectations of Government. Discussion of certain data problems highlights deficiencies in the regular supply of information, and leads to the conclusion that when major policy changes occur it should be normal for explicit consideration to be given to the supply of information needed to monitor the operation of the new policy.

The UK government places considerable emphasis on the targeting of resources to areas most in need. For the Single Regeneration Budget and other purposes, use is made of the Index of Local Deprivation (ILD), formerly the Index of Local Conditions (ILC), to identify eligible areas. In this paper we show that this index suffers from such serious structural defects that it is unsuitable for the purpose to which it is put. These defects include the scale dependency of the index, the inappropriate treatment of positive and negative numbers, the unequal weights assigned to the indicators used and the difficulties introduced by using a nonlinear structure for the index. Recent decisions to modify the ILD do not address these defects and one change that has been mooted would exaggerate the scale bias. Suggestions are made for what should be done in replacing and supplementing the ILD to provide a better basis for assessing relative need.