THE BACKGROUND TO AND MOTIVATION FOR A REGIONAL ECONOMIC POLICY AT A NATIONAL LEVEL I Introduction

Interest in regional problems is not very old. Before the world economic crisis of the 1930s, it was believed that the geographical distribution of economic development was determined by natural circumstances and that it was vain to try to change that distribution. From the theoretical viewpoint regional disequilibrium was thought to be only a temporary problem in a general automatic system of economic equilibrium. All this led Samuelson to write : 'Spatial problems have been so neglected in economic theory that the field is of interest for its own sake.'