Globalising Economic Spaces, Uneven Development and Regional Challenges: Introduction to the Special Issue

Abstract

The phenomenon of spatially uneven development has always captured the interest of economic geographers, forming one of the foundation stones of the discipline and a major research focus in analyses of both advanced or emerging economies (Hayter and Patchell, 2011; Sheppard et al., 2009). The economic exploitation of localized resources to improve the quality of people’s lives inevitably leads to widening of interregional economic disparities, engendering dynamics, which, over time, change little and are rarely reversed. Interregional disparities simply transform, assume different guises and, at times, shift between places. They never really vanish. And convergence is rare, as investigations of interregional disparities in Europe have shown (Badingera et al., 2004; Martin, 2001) and the USA (Caselli and Coleman, 2001). However, measuring the dynamics of interregional divergence and convergence is both demanding and problematic (Puga, 1999; Rey and Janikas, 2005). Consequently, the dynamics of spatially uneven development remain a major research question with significant and enduring policy relevance.