Regional Policy and the North-South Divide

Abstract

Since the 1920s, successive British governments have grappled with the problem which has become known as the north-south divide. Job opportunities have been consistently worse in many northern parts of Britain than in the south and this has led to successive attempts to create more jobs in areas of high unemployment. Britain is still faced, however, with severe regional problems. Regional differences in unemployment, for example, have been worse in the 1980s than at any time since the Great Depression in the 1930s.

Jim Taylor and Harvey Armstrong are respectively Professor and Senior Lecturer in the Department of Economics at the University of Lancaster. They also edit Regional Studies, the journal of the Regional Studies Association. This is an updated and revised version of a text first published in January 1987 and reissued in September 1988.