ABSTRACT
The Federal Republic of Germany now has one of the strongest economies of Europe and ranks among the most advanced countries in high-tech manufacturing activities. As for Western Europe, Cheshire concludes that – even allowing for the inadequacy of the data – deindustrialisation and tertiarisation appear to be 'accompanied by income polarisation and inequality', especially in the United Kingdom, 'where the processes are most advanced'. Eventually, from mid-1985 on, general economic conditions improved, partly in response to the renewed growth of the world economy and access to an enlarged market following Spain's entry in January 1986 into the European Community. Technically, the structural cyclical issue on regional economic transformation is whether the losses of manufacturing firms and jobs over the past two or three decades reflect much more than the shake-out and the flexible adjustments accompanying the severe downturn of the economic cycle.
