ABSTRACT
While regional economic policy has a high political profile at the level of the individual parliamentary constituency and the single town or city, in the national political arena regional policy has to shout for attention among many competing voices. Too often, it could be argued, regional policy in Britain has been deployed at the centre to meet visible and apparently short term economic problems (high rates of unemployment, large plant closures, inadequate stocks of factory building, etc), but using weapons that are essentially those of medium and long term economic adjustment. The political pay off extends beyond the Parliamentary cycle. This may be why the political noise comes from equity arguments, but the real achievement has come from efficiency gains and the deployment of policy to pull up the long run scale and productivity of economic resources in the lagging regions.
