Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
cent in Great Britain in total. Growth in business services is massive, despite the
1987 crash, measured roughly by the southeast region's (London plus its outer
suburbs) increase in male employment in business services plus the financial
sector over 1981-94, from 10.9 per cent of employment, to 18.5 per cent.
Some of the services do not correspond to separate firms, as they are managed
from within the firm. Thus, some of the legal work, the advertising, the
consultations about information technology, or the firm accounting, will be
conducted within the firm, often at the head offices or offices attached to them.
This is indexed by the numbers of major firms that have head offices in specific
cities. Among those in the top 500 biggest global firms, Tokyo is home to 34,
New York to 59, London to 37, and Paris to 26. Many large cities have few such
firms; Mexico City, perhaps the world's largest city today, has one of the 500,
while Calcutta has none.
Within one country, the UK, of the top 500 company headquarters, 198 are
located within London (
Financial Times,
20 Jan. 1997). In Britain as elsewhere,
there is some sharing of the service boom. Some banks transferred their more
repetitive work to other cities, and some moved wholesale to another city, such
as Lloyds Bank to Bristol. This still leaves a few cities with concentrated
producer service industries.
If services are acknowledged as having dynamic potential in spatial
concentrations, there are two kinds of adjustments to development theory and
planning that can be made. On the “negative” side, it is of little value to bemoan
the loss of a manufacturing function in some advanced countries where the
process of deindustrialization has been going on for a long time. On the other
hand, it is worth while including, or allowing for, services provision within any
planning for development, especially, it would seem, for the advanced countries
that are losing manufacturing and acquiring a dominant service role. These
points are taken up in the following two sections.
Lamenting industrial decline:
the deindustrialization
problem
Taking first the point mentioned of worrying over lost manufacturing, a whole
literature grew up in the 1980s describing and analyzing the problem of
deindustrialization (Martin & Rowthorn 1986, Townsend 1993). An example is
the process in the northeast of England (Hudson 1986), where unemployment
rates rose from about 2 per cent in the 1950s, to 18.3 per cent in 1984.
Manufacturing employment, centring around iron and steel, reduced by about
130,000 jobs over 1956-82, and coalmining by 120,000. Government policy is
heavily indicted by Hudson for the decline of regional policy and support for the
key industries. We may make two comments. The first is that many of the
problems of unemployment were created, in the first place, by placing
key industries in government hands as nationalized industries. For several
decades after the Second World War, these industries were supported and their
