World Regional Disparities – Geography – UGC NET – Notes

Introduction

• Regional disparities in economic development are one of the common features found in all over the world today. Regional disparity denotes regional imbalances or regional dualism or growth differentiation.
• Regional Disparities refer to differences in economic development and uneven economic achievement in different geographical regions.
• The coexistence of relatively developed and economically depressed states and even regions within each state is known as a regional imbalance.
• Many countries are characterized by significant regional disparities in economic performance and living standards, as reflected in income, education, or health outcomes.
• These regional disparities raise equity concerns: they contribute to overall within-country inequality, and they are linked to inequality of opportunity, as measured by, say, intergenerational mobility Regional disparities may also have harmful implications for economic efficiency, as limited opportunities for those stuck in the wrong place lead to the underutilization of potential and constrain overall growth. 
• More broadly, regional disparities, including urban-rural differences, can fuel social tensions and pathologies, increase populism and resentment towards urban elites, threaten countries’ social fabric and national cohesion, and in extreme cases lead to conflict, particularly where the disparities reinforce existing ethnic, racial, linguistic, or religious divisions.
• Regional disparities in the development of regions of a country may slow the growth of the entire national economy.
• The development process nowadays generally concentrate around the few main territories of a nation and others do not receive the benefits of such development due to factors like market imperfection, geographical constraints, false government policies, lack of law and order and other social, political and economic reasons.
• Determination of such disparities is required for the creation of proper economic policies, needed to take actions against factors hindering economic growth.
• Even the richest country in the world- the USA has the problem of imbalanced regional development and many small countries (such as Italy & France) and socialist countries (such as Russia and China) are also facing this problem. Different regions of a country grow at very unequal rates, resulting inter-regional and intra-regional disparities which in turn give socio-economic problems.
• In India, regional disparities exist from the British time period. The British rulers, as well as industrialists, started to develop only those embarked regions of the country which were potentially suitable for prosperous manufacturing and trading activities and served their interests.
• The British industrialist preferred to concentrate their activities mostly on metropolitan cities like Calcutta, Bombay, and Chennai, etc. as compared to the other cities of the country.
• The uneven pattern of investment in industries as well as in economic overhead like transportation and communication facilities, irrigation, and power made by the British has resulted in regional disparities in India.
• Disparities in economic and social development across the regions and intra-regional disparities among different segments of the society have been the major plank for adopting planning in India since independence.
• During the first three decades of planning, the government gave much stress to establishing heavy industries in backward regions but this problem remained unabated. The accelerated economic growth since the 1980s appears to have aggravated regional disparities.
• The ongoing economic reform since 1991 with stabilization and deregulation policies as their central pieces seems to have further widened the regional disparities because the benefits of economic growth after economic reforms were not distributed equally among the states.
• From many studies, it is clear that the development of any region depends upon natural resources, human resources, etc. But in spite of the availability of such kinds of resources, many regions remained still backward like Orissa, Bihar, and Jharkhand, etc.
• Thus in India, the process of development has not been determined by the availability of these resources alone; political and social factors are also important for the development.

Regional Imbalance

• Regional imbalance is defined as a state of disequilibrium in terms of economic and social criteria existing between two regions over the landscape.
• It is a condition in which an economy fails to extend benefits equally to all regions in the country or class in society.
• This uneven economic development is either due to historical processes like colonialization or due to socio-economic processes.
• It exists both in capitalist and socialist countries, for example, capital concentration in West Europe and North America.
• Regional imbalance can be spatial (inter-regional imbalance such as Eastern Uttar Pradesh and Western Uttar Pradesh, intraregional such as Uttar Pradesh and Punjab) or social (class differentiation such as regions with the dwellings of the people from lower cast may be less developed than that of the higher cast)
• Regional Imbalance has two dimensions
  • Regional disparity and development
  • Class differentiation
• Regional imbalance can further be classified into
  • Inter-Regional imbalance (Eastern and Western India)
  • Intra-Regional imbalance (Vidarbha and Western Maharashtra, Coastal Andhra Pradesh is more developed, in USA North East area is more developed)
• Natural resources and geographical factors like location and accessibility are not homogenous. The landscape never follows the “principle of isomorphism”. Regional imbalances are the result of such heterogeneous character of the physical nature of the earth.
• At one place it has all the natural advantages while others may have a disadvantage or physical constraints to growth.
• However, the spread of human phenomenon introduces even more variability by its technological application and difference across the landscape in terms of socio-economic growth are aggravated and disequilibrium sets on with a typical characteristics flow pattern where a segment of earth or region attracts resources, people, factors of production and involve into a gigantic economic force by extracting and desertifying the surrounding (e.g. Bhilai region has attracted factors of production and has emerged as a developed town, but the surrounding areas have been desertified in terms of growth and development).

Thus, Regional imbalance refers to the disequilibrium or disparity in terms of resource, productive economic growth, an assemblage of factors of production between two or more regions, culminating into development disparities, regional consciousness, and generating a flow pattern towards the developed region and polarisation, agglomeration and fused economic growth.