Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
coasts. Another change is towards new light industries, in small and medium-
sized firms, and away from the old large industries such as those of the
Cantabrian coast. These have declined as a result of increasing international
competition, which has been felt increasingly as the national economy has
opened, first timidly in the 1960s, then more strongly in the 1970s and 1980s. A
further change worth noting is that towards incorporation of Spain into European
markets for food products. This has driven the expansion of fruit and vegetable
growing for export markets, replacing traditional crops which were those needed
to feed the protected domestic market of Spain itself. A final set of changes is the
attractiveness that a more open Spain represented for international firms after
1960. This brought in labour-intensive manufacturing such as the car
manufacturers, to cities such as Valencia, Barcelona, Madrid and Zaragoza,
where they had a combination of relatively cheap labour and good access to the
European market.
The regions that emerge as those of greatest economic growth are the whole
Mediterranean coast, from Gerona north of Barcelona, south through Valencia
and Murcia, to the Andalucian Costa del Sol. There is also accelerated growth in
the Ebro axis from Barcelona towards the northwest (Garcia Delgado 1991, Chs
18-20). In these regions there is a different structure of firms from that in the
older industrial zones (Vasquez Barquero 1990). Many small firms with fewer
than ten employees are found, and many new firms have been created in the
intermediate-size towns and cities of the regions. Much of the growth is related
to new powers given to local governments, which are acting often in concert with
private enterprise to create industrial parks and provide infrastructure for new
firms (Vasquez Barquero 1990).
This collection of massive changes, especially since 1960, has had only
modest effects on the patterns of interregional disparity in incomes and in
standards of living. Because of the decline of some more prosperous regions like
that of Bilbao, at the same time as the rise of some poorer ones as on the
southern Mediterranean coast, the income levels are converging over time. There
have been measures of the standard of living based on a variety of indicators
(Barke 1989, Barke and Park 1994) that show that these have also converged,
although somewhat later, in the 1980s. On such social indicators as the number of
cinemas, the number of suicides, and the number of telephone calls per thousand
population, and welfare provision such as schools and doctors, the trends were
towards interregional equality in the 1980s. On the other hand, summing the
results, there remains high diversity because of the extreme values of social
disorder in some large cities such as Barcelona and Madrid, where there are high
rates of crime and vehicle accidents. These results are to be anticipated, in a
country undergoing a rapid urbanization and industrialization trend.
The explanation in terms of Kondratiev waves does not entirely fit this
evolution of Spanish spatial economy. While early stages seem to correspond to
the Kondratiev model, the late twentieth century changes have come as a
