Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
first development in one central point, the largest or most important city, which
leads to an imbalance between the centre and the periphery. The centre sets up the
first manufacturing industry and accumulates wealth, which affects the build-up
of services and administration in the central city. Over time, however, there is
migration of factors, and Friedmann postulated the outward movement of some
capital—in the form of factories which are too confined in the centre and seek
cheaper land and labour in the outer regions—and the inward movement of
labour as migration from rural areas. These various movements are benign, in
that they generally tend to reduce the inequalities of income between regions. A
need for some governmental intervention is seen, however, especially in the
intermediate periods when the greatest differences between centre and periphery
are seen.
The set of movements defines four kinds of region according to this model:
the centre, with its rapid growth and problems of congestion; the “upward
transitional” region, with capital in-migration as the recipient of overspill
factories and also immigration of people; the “downward transitional” region,
with out-migration of people and capital; and a fourth kind of region, the
“resource frontier”, with slight population but massive natural resources. This
final kind of region reflects the fact that Friedmann elaborated the model with
reference to South America and especially Venezuela; elsewhere, such regions
are obviously not always found. In later years Friedmann reversed his view of
development by joining the dependency school (1973). His original view,
however, presents a clear case for the diffusionist arguments.
Attached to this centre-periphery thinking, and to the neo-classical vision of
development, is a literature concerning balanced and unbalanced growth, which
was the central debate in development theory of the 1950s (see Agarwala &
Singh 1958 for review). On one side, an early view was that balanced
development was needed, especially balanced in the aid being given to help the
revitalization of the European economies after the Second World War. The
argument here was that these economies had suffered in all sectors, and failure to
help any one would create bottlenecks that would thwart development. The
contrary view, which came to prevail, was given by Hirschman (1958), who
advocated unbalanced development as a necessity in aid programmes, on several
grounds. One was that this was the historical way in which development had
always happened—one sector had the lead, and others had followed. For
example, the railways had been a nineteenth century lead sector, and attracted all
the best brains of the day, as well as the capital available for risky ventures. Other
sectors had been brought along in the wake of this dynamic sector. A related
argument was that each country had a limited amount of skilled people and
administrative ability, so that a focused approach was imperative. Hirschman's
ideas, on the need to concentrate, combined well with his view that development
did diffuse out to the periphery: the diffusionist view which contrasted with
Myrdal's and others' espousal of the dependency arguments.
