ABSTRACT
Global economic spaces have been considerably reshaped in the last two decades. Uneven development is prevalent, and spatial inequality is unlikely to be eliminated or may even be substantially reduced in these environments. Two contrasting views on spatial inequality exist—namely, convergence and divergence. In the neoclassical equilibrium economics model, the general trend of regional convergence over time is challenged through the flow of labor and capital toward the direction of equilibrium over space, in an integrated national space economy. In the neoclassical model, migration might be expected to reduce spatial inequality, resulting in regional convergence. However, such migration is selective and especially common among higher skilled workers, and might cause regional divergence instead of convergence (Kanbur and Rapport, 2005). The new empirics of regional convergence in industrialized countries recently revealed a much slower regional convergence rate than that proposed by the orthodox neoclassical model (Martin and Sunley, 1998).
