Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
CHAPTER 1
The nature of development
The drive for improvement in human conditions, in personal happiness and in
social wellbeing, is innate in every society. It has been more openly expressed in
the last 50 years, and that part of happiness which lies under social rather than
individual control has been the object of endeavour by theorists and public
agencies seeking to understand the processes involved and to control them. At
the broadest level, these aspects of human improvement comprise what is
involved in development.
Fifty years ago the term “development” was used largely in the context of
economic change. Economic growth may be defined as the increase in
production or consumption of a nation or a region, while economic development
is the increase of such production or consumption by each person, putting growth
onto a per capita basis. Economic growth may increase the weight of a nation in
world affairs, but it may fail to make life any easier for its inhabitants. Economic
development provides this increase in goods and services which may be felt by
the population.
The geographic scale
As understanding of some of the complex links between economy and other human
processes has increased, so the definition of development has been amplified
from the purely economic to include other elements that lie within the scope of
social action. The subject of development is also studied more widely, by
economists still but also by sociologists, political scientists and geographers as
well as other social scientists. In this work, we focus on the spatial aspects, and
particularly at the regional, subnational level, although some of the observations
concern whole countries, since these too may form geographical patterns.
Regions that form large and economically, socially and culturally identifiable
parts of a nation state are the obvious focus, because they have been the object of
most analysis regarding spatial differences in development levels or wealth, and
the object of policies which individual governments have put in place to modify
these spatial differences. Differences within countries should be amenable to
change through policy because this can be controlled by a single state; it is also
seen as desirable to reduce these differences, for reasons of bringing
