ABSTRACT
The fifteen member-countries of the European Union (EU) offer some instructive comparisons for the planner – both with each other, and still more so with the experience of Britain as outlined in the preceding chapters. Except for Portugal, Spain and Greece in the extreme south, these are all highly industrialized countries; but in general – with the possible exception of Belgium – their industrialization took place later than Britain’s, took rather different forms and had rather different spatial effects. When Britain joined the then European Community in 1973, it had only some 3 per cent of its labour force in agriculture, and some 80 per cent of its population was urban – a percentage almost unchanged since the beginning of the twentieth century. But the ten EC countries at that time still had about 14 per cent of their workers in agriculture, and in general a higher proportion of their people lived in villages and small towns. Since then there has been a dramatic change: by 1999 employment in primary production (agriculture, forestry and fishing) in the fifteen EU countries was less than 5 per cent, though the proportion rose to one-quarter in Greece and to over 15 per cent in parts of Spain and Portugal; industrial employment was down to just under 30 per cent, and services employed 65.5 per cent of the total EU workforce.
