GROWTH AREAS, GROWTH CENTRES AND REGIONAL CONVERSION

Five arguments in favour of a growth area strategy have been analysed and though all of them lack empirical substance, they have certain merits on a priori grounds. Thus any policy which contributes, on the long‐run, to a more rapid concentration of a region's population into relatively large urban areas, is likely to create the conditions for servicing net and replacement demand for social/economic overhead capital at a low per capita cost. Moreover for a given subsidy cost, discriminatory investment in the dense, complex, urbanised areas of a region may maximise the flow of income to regional earners in the short‐run: attract the maximum flow of exogenous enterprise and capital; and give the best chance of creating a new export base which reduces the regional balance‐of‐payments deficit and provides sufficient job‐opportunities to restrain the flow out of the region of the economically active. In addition, the quality and content of shortterm regional planning may be improved if the mix and scheduling of public investment over time is given a rigorous spatial dimension. Thus, on all of these counts, there are convincing reasons for encouraging an especially rapid development of the relative large, dense interrelated urban areas and by contrast good reasons for a relative neglect of the small hinterland areas.