Competing Structural and Institutional Influences on the Geography of Production in Europe

In this paper the spatial implications for Europe of major structural and institutional changes affecting the production system are examined. The concern is to establish whether these changes are enabling a greater localisation or globalisation of intrafirm and interfirm relations and, associated with this, greater scope for local economic development. The paper begins with a critical survey of an influential paradigm in which it is sustained that the transfer from Fordism to post-Fordism implies a return to regional economies. It is then argued that contemporary restructuring in Europe is very much a matter of a global extension of old and new forms of industrial organisation—a process which does not augur well for self-sustaining development at the local level. This thesis is further sustained and elaborated through a consideration, in the second half of the paper, of the implications for less-favoured regions related to the transition to market forms of spatial governance at the level of the nation-state, and, at the level of the European Community, the policy reforms connected to the completion of the Single European Market.