 Catching Up or Falling Behind? Economic Performance and Regional Trajectories in the “New Europe”Mick Dunford and Adrian Smith Economic Geography, 2000, vol. 76, issue 2, 169-195 Abstract: This paper examines the trajectories of economic development of European national and regional economies in light of the pressures for greater integration and enlargement of the European Union. Using a variety of data sets, we demonstrate that there are significant variations in the speed and direction of change in per capita income and in productivity and employment rates across countries and a sample of European regions, and that falling behind (divergence) occurs as well as catching up (convergence). Making sense of spatial development therefore requires, we argue, that attention be paid to processes of differentiation and, in particular, to the falling behind experienced by less developed areas in East Central Europe and the forging ahead of the most developed, as well as to processes of catch-up. The paper also contributes to an assessment of the appropriateness of interpretations of growth and spatial development through countering the dominant discourse of convergence in neoclassical and neoliberal formulations and by suggesting that integration brings with it a number of important territorial “costs” associated with increasing inequality. Date: 2000 Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:recgxx:v:76:y:2000:i:2:p:169-195 Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from DOI: 10.1111/j.1944-8287.2000.tb00139.x Access Statistics for this article Economic Geography is currently edited by James Murphy More articles in Economic Geography from Taylor & Francis Journals |
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