Regional problem

This book is about political economy and the regions. It advances some of the main arguments developed in Capital versus the Regions (Macmillan, 1976) and relates them to regional policies and problems in Western Europe and the United States.

One of the key themes in the work is the extent to which the main body of regional theory and policy in capitalist countries is divorced from the unequal competition between big-league and small-league firms. In other words, the trend to monopoly and multi-national capital has established a new meso-economic sector between the conventional macro- and micro-economic orthodoxies as displayed in the literature.

Unless governments harness this meso-economic power as the basis for new regional planning they will not be able to transform the present imbalance in the regional distribution of jobs and incomes. Yet the harnessing of meso-economic power represents a major challenge to both liberal capitalist ideology and the modern capitalist state.

State capitalism, through new public enterprise, played a major role in the early regional development of the United States, and has been given new dimensions by some post-war European governments. But state capitalism poses its own problems for the governments which introduce it. It challenges the dominance of private power in the heartland of the modern capitalist economy. For such and other reasons, it is difficult to introduce a radical and effective regional policy without confronting private capitalist power and transcending the limits of state capitalist policies. Only the main parties of the European Left in Britain, France and Italy have real prospects of transforming problem regions in a strategy for wider political and economic transformation.