The New Flexible Economy: Shaping Regional and Local Institutions for Global Competition

A major disappointment of the era of strong regional policies of the 1960s and 1970s was their failure to eliminate regional disparities, both economic and technological. The lack of success had at least two causes. First, the typical regional policy of that era was:

“essentially top-down in nature. It was based on large-scale, spatially-concen- trated industrial and infrastructure investments, with decision-making largely in the hands of large industrial oligopolies and financial institutions. The prevailing conceptual base for regional planning was growth pole theory, whose influence eventually extended throughout the world. Although a considerable amount of industrial decentralization took place in this context, the quality of the decentralized jobs left much to be desired. In retrospect, it is apparent that externally-induced growth typically did not provide a solid basis for sustained regional or local development” (Hansen, 1987).