ABSTRACT
Regional development has become a favourite aspect of national development for foreign aid donors to support. There has been a tendency for countries preparing both national and regional development plans to carve up the national economy into regions, and offer them, as though on a platter, to various aid donors. The United Nations itself made two major contributions to thought about regional development. The United Nations Research Institute for Social Development mounted a research program on regional development under the direction of Antoni Kuklinski. Brazil provides us with an example of a large, resource-rich, highly regionalized, country of recent settlement. For the last thirty-five years regional development has been a high priority objective of national economic policy. Brazil suffers very large regional disparities, owing to the concentration of the modern sector in the South Central, and to a lesser extent the Southern region, and the concentration of the traditional sector in the Northeast and the North.
