ABSTRACT
The post-war period has witnessed the emergence of some form of regional development policy (RDP) in most countries of the world. It is not easy to generalise either about the reasons for such policies or on their objectives since to a certain extent each country is unique in terms of area, location, size of population and economic wealth, historical evolution and political ideology. The term ‘regional development policy’ is not itself always used unambiguously, but in this essay it will be taken to mean policies operated by the state or state agencies which seek to influence economic development as between the major regions of the country. Policies initiated by local authorities or state policies concerned with intra-urban change will be largely ignored, although quite clearly there may be some overlap and interaction between them. The subject matter has grown enormously during the last two decades and space will only permit a review of the main features of the topic. The first issue to be discussed concerns the reasons why governments choose to have RDPs and what objectives they seek to achieve when such policies are adopted. There are many types of policy and these are briefly described in the next section, together with the approach to the delimitation of regions. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the impact of these policies is assessed to see how far the objectives have been achieved. Although RDP is widely found, in many countries it is often only weakly developed. Discussion will inevitably focus on those countries where policies are important and where most research has been produced.
