Remaining Issues

Abstract

Regional policy instruments of the sort suggested in the last section have been widely applied. However, it is very difficult to evaluate their success. Regional policy has had a relatively short history in most countries and seldom have the objectives been precisely quantified. Hence, the evaluation of success is not possible in any quantitative manner. Moreover, of course, such evaluation requires knowledge of what would have happened to regional variations in average income, unemployment, and so on, in the absence of policy. Thus, a fully-fledged model of regional development, including policy variables, is required. Dynamic as well as static influences should be incorporated, since part of the impact of regional policies will normally be in changing structural characteristics and the pattern of inter-regional/inter-sectoral linkages. At present we have no such operational model.