The Coming Regional Crisis (And How To Avoid It)

The analysis of regional development and the formation of development policies is currently excessively influenced by the assumption that globalization represents the overriding causal influence and policy imperative. This bias seems to derive from insufficiently critical borrowings from the management literature, and the emergence of a stratum of economic development actors concerned primarily with regional 'competitiveness'. The article suggests that the objectivity of analysis, and the economic rationality of policy making, can be improved by paying more attention to 'localized' activities, to regional economic welfare and to the impact of regionalization on macroeconomic policy making.