ABSTRACT
In Canada, Prime Minister Martin Brian Mulroney, for all his faith in the market, was not being so foolish as to try to scrap regional development policy altogether. He compromised by decentralizing it and by shifting its forces towards entrepreneurship. An increasingly integrated international economy also holds far reaching implications for how nation states or states and provinces should organize to promote regional development. In practice, either a market economy or a socialist one operates in such a way as to create regional imbalances. Indeed the growing integration of the world economy is pushing nation states, and large private enterprises, into a borderless world. Big government and public spending come under attack as never before and leading economists urged governments to withdraw from a number of policy fields, notably regional development. There is a fourth level of planning which the authors have not yet mentioned but which is just as fundamental as the others: transnational or global planning.
