ABSTRACT
Europe varies from modern, service-oriented, world metropolitan regions, such as London or Paris, to backward regions where more than 40 per cent of the population still derive their livelihoods from peasant agriculture. One of the important lessons of the European experience is that the conclusions one reaches about both the incidence and extent of transformation and deindustrialization and the judgements one forms as to the impact and policy implications of the process depend critically on how regions are defined and how the process is measured. The experience of the individual member states of the European Community between 1983 and 1987 represents an unexpectedly extreme situation. There is evidence that across the major urban regions of the European Community there have been problems of labour market adjustment, and wider problems too, resulting from the decline of industrial employment, but that a concentration of regional employment in industry alone was a barely significant factor.
