ABSTRACT
The dominant employers in Clydeside, South Wales and Tyneside were concentrated in precisely those industries: any sectoral downturn inevitably triggered severe regional problems. Recent discussions of regional problems and policy have focused and drawn on theories of 'endogenous growth'. The emphasis on technology and technical progress, which underpins much of the endogenous growth theory literature, also tended to be applied across the country or continent, regardless of initial regional disparities. Thus, local levers of control were being lost through the closure of regionally based industries, at the same time as the Keynesian demand management system was being dismantled, its essential spatial elements downgraded. Cumulative causation cycles and past dependencies were significant factors in curtailing the applicability of many models and approaches to the regeneration of the old industrial regions but all too frequently they were neither recognised nor acknowledged. As the elements of cumulative causation become embedded in the regional economy power also moves progressively to higher levels.
