Regional development models

This entry emphasises the fact that, considered as a whole, models of regional development afford analyses of a range of centripetal and centrifugal forces, and that relative development depends on the relative weight of these two sets of forces. It also emphasises the fact that regional development is dialectical/cumulative in character as consequences are causes and causes are consequences: what happens at one point in time is in part a consequence of what happened earlier. In the light of these observations it provides a historical survey of the often competing models put forward. After an account of neoclassical models of regional convergence and related models of modernization and stages of development, attention is paid to models of uneven development including theories of circular and cumulative causation, dependency and unequal exchange and to related concerns with the relative merits of exogenous and endogenous development. A number of these ideas were taken up in more recent models of endogenous growth which are also considered along with some of the core ideas developed in the new economic geography whose goal is to explain the geographical concentration of people and economic activities and the forces that shape the geography of resource endowments.