Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
An example of the attractions to firms is presented by Scotland. The Central
Scotland belt is currently successful in attracting new employment and some
new firms, especially in the electronics sector. The new firms are locating, not
exactly in the main sites of the old industries such as Glasgow with its multiple
heavy industries, Motherwell with its steelmaking, Clydebank with shipbuilding,
or Dundee with its jute mills, but in small and medium-sized towns on the edge
of the region with more attractive environments for a new white-collar
workforce, replacing the blue-collar force of the coal and heavy engineering
industries. Only where very special credits and aid are given, as at Motherwell
and Clydebank with Enterprise Zone status, do firms reoccupy the old sites.
In the new Scottish regional development agencies, there has been some
success in combining good quality-of-life elements as attractions to firms, with a
positive programme for developing human capital. Thus Scottish Enterprise, the
main agency for the nation, distributed in 1994, through its 14 local enterprise
companies, 37.5 per cent of its funds into education and training for youth and
adults.
To take a single one of these companies, the Skye and Lochalsh Enterprise,
based at Portree in Skye, in 1994-95 put its efforts into many human capital
investments. One sector was its programme for Enterprise Training, helping
individuals to set up firms. Another two were Training for Work, and Youth
Training, helping employees, especially new traineee entrants to firms, to get the
necessary skills. One was for Community Action, helping local communities to
organize themselves and strengthen the community structures. Attached to this is
a programme for revitalizing cultural heritage, especially the use of the Gaelic
language, in recognition of the fact that traditionally strong communities were
found among the Gaelic-speaking communities of Skye. Apart from individual
schemes, the style of the agency is to work in partnership schemes wherever
possible, relying on and building local communities or firms as social units
which will make their own decisions rather than grow in dependency.
The Skye agency's success is hard to measure in precise terms. An indirect
measure is the growth of population, of over 10 per cent in both the 1970s and
1980s, following a long decline in earlier decades. This was not a growth of
retirees, but of young workers for the most part; the employment growth over
1981-89 was the highest in Scotland at 61.9 per cent (Scottish Office 1992).
Less developed countries
For these countries, rather than examine directly the welfare issue of the
developed countries, we look at the empirical evidence of social levels in various
countries. These tend to show a strong positive relationship between the social
and the economic, although the direction of causality is not clear.
Concerning the civil society and Fukuyama's claims for its importance in
development, many LDCS have an advantage in that their traditional civil
society base, the family and the extended family, as well as village communities,
