Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
thought between a right- and left-wing view of this matter. In that chapter, the
discussion was restricted to state interventions within the confines of a single
nation state. The argument could have been enlarged to include international aid
and interventions, and here there has been a vigorous debate, ending with the
substantive defeat of the idea and the practice of development aid, despite the
caricature of the opponents given by Toye (1987).
Most of the intra-nation debate was about the value of intervention in order to
reduce the inequality thrown up by the development process, as innovations
brought an advantage to specific social groups or geographical regions and
countries.
In the last century, a number of writers like William Morris (MacCarthy 1994)
or Robert Owen, followed into the early part of this century by Ebenezer Howard
(Moss-Eccardt 1973), saw the need to correct a growing urban-rural imbalance,
to which newly developing industries contributed. Through most of the twentieth
century, a growing consensus of opinion was that intervention was indeed
justified, and the central aim of regional development policy, in the UK and
elsewhere, was constructed as the reduction of the inequalities through policies
to attract industry, through projects to build new infrastructure such as roads or
hydroelectric installations, or through national sectoral policies which provided
public services at equal prices regardless of the cost of bringing them to the
region. Part of the welfare state philosophy was the provision of services to all at
an even level of supply, and regional development thus became part of the
welfare idea. This was challenged in the 1980s by the neo-liberal reversion to
markets and freer competition, which implied no special treatment for regions
with poorer service provision.
Intervention was increasingly criticized in the advanced economies, because
of the very telling evidence that it was unsuccessful in reducing inequalities, as
in the UK over the past 50 years, and because its strategy was often wrong. In the
British case, as in Spain and Europe generally, this intervention had been to
maintain specific regions and industries despite global tendencies for these
industries to be relocated in newly developing countries with major advantages
such as lower material and labour costs. Intervention to support steelmaking in
Scotland was misplaced philanthropy, because it consigned the central Scotland
belt to a sector with poor growth and profitability in the whole of Europe, and
reliant on resources that were becoming scarcer and more costly in the home
region. Eventual conversion has cost the central government more in redirecting
aid to new industries and locations, and has ensured high unemployment and
inappropriate training for large numbers of workers in the declining industries of
coal, steel and heavy engineering. The debate on intervention was thus
apparently won by those denying its utility.
In the LDCS, too, there were plenty of examples of state intervention to help
regions, which were misplaced from the point of view of promotion of
development. In Latin America, for example (Morris 1987), intervention was
sometimes fighting the results of natural disaster, sometimes defending political
