The Urban-Rural Manufacturing Shift in the European Community

Abstract

The paper documents, for the first time at the European Community scale, a relative shift of manufacturing industry from highly urbanised to rural regions during the 1970s. This shift is evident in terms of GDP, industrial output and manufacturing employment, and has occurred despite an urban region structural bias towards more modern, viable, industries such as electronics, aerospace and vehicles. Moreover, the shift characterises every individual EC country for which data are available. The degree to which the data are consistent with three different explanatory viewpoints, focussing on production cost differences, the impact of constrained locations, and capital restructuring, is also considered.