ABSTRACT
In Italy the richest region has been the North-East around Bologna where recent economic growth was primarily on small enterprises; in Britain the wealthy South-East centres on London, which has become a globalised international financial centre. Each of these four types of region (traditional rural, old industrial, growth pole, world city) forms one part of this chapter. While during the 1990s at least regional inequalities within the states that had joined before the 1990s had narrowed, but regional differences within states have if anything widened again. Before the advent of the European Union, European states tried to reduce regional inequalities within their boundaries. British regional policy dates back to the Depression of the 1930s with the 1934 Distressed Areas Act. As the ideology of the Commission shifts away from notions of rights to notions of competitiveness, in regional policy there is less and less belief in a specific ‘European’ approach to regional inequality.
