Endogenous Regional Development

Abstract

Over the past few decades the emphasis in regional development theory has shifted from a focus primarily on exogenous factors to an increasing focus on endogenous factors. Traditional regional economic development approaches were erected on neoclassical economic growth theory, based largely on the Solow (1956, 2000) growth model. The emerging endogenous approaches – while recognizing that development is framed by exogenous factors – attribute a much more significant role for endogenous forces. In that context, a suite of models and arguments that broadly convey the ‘new growth theory’ have been directed towards endogenous factors and processes (see, for example, Johansson et al., 2001). Those developments are of great interest to regional development analysts and also to practitioners for several reasons, including the recognition of the importance of cities and regions in the development process, and also because they introduce an explicit spatial variable into economic development and growth theory, which was a mostly ignored element in neoclassical thinking. This evolutionary development is particularly significant as the importance of regions in national economies – and in particular the role of many of the world’s mega-city regions – has changed considerably since the 1970s as a result of globalization, deregulation and structural change and adjustment. Understanding these recently recognized processes of change are crucial for analysing and understanding different patterns of regional economic performance and in formulating and implementing regional economic development planning strategy. This book focuses explicitly on endogenous regional development, attempting to provide a range of disciplinary perspectives on the nature of endogeneity and what endogenous regional development is about, how it might be conceptualized, measured and modelled, and how empirical analysis taking an endogenous perspective may be conducted at different levels of spacial scale.