ABSTRACT
Modern academic thinking on regional development, and the welter of policies which have reflected it in the past decades, has proceeded primarily from an economic perspective. This chapter sketches three aspects of the population factor which is important for regional development. These are the non-homogeneity of populations, the nature of migration, and the quality of populations. The chapter looks at the mobility of one particular factor, labor, and its implications for regional policy. It offers some illustrations of the importance of population differentiation for regional modeling in general and for policy-oriented modeling in particular. The chapter finds that the new fundamentalism often provides invaluable criticism of unreflecting interventionism. A quite different type of magical regional development planning has emerged in recent years in nations as different as the United States and China under labels such as "enterprise zones". The technical literature and technically based policy in regional development traces its principal line of descent to Alfred Weber's branch of social science.
