ABSTRACT

Although it took the European Community nearly two decades to establish a distinct regional policy backed up by appropriate funding mechanisms, the need for selective intervention to deal with regional economic imbalances had been recognized by most of the would-be Member States even before the Second World War. Economic decline had been regionally selective in the inter-war years and the genesis of regional policy to combat regional decline emerged before 1939. In Britain, for example, the regions of predominantly basic industry (heavy engineering, shipbuilding and coal mining) were severely depressed and legislation was enacted which enabled specific assistance to be given to those areas. By the 1950s and 1960s, regional economic planning came to be used increasingly in other West European countries as the problems of economic decline, unemployment and low growth assumed a distinctly regional dimension. In some areas these were problems of very poor agricultural development; in others, they were problems of industrial decline.