Growth Poles: An Evaluation of Their Propulsive Effect

Abstract

This paper sets out to examine the contention that economic growth will diffuse naturally from a medium-sized growing urban centre to the area immediately surrounding that centre, and eventually beyond into more distant parts of the region. An attempt is made to assess the validity of some existing theoretical and intuitive ideas concerning the spatial diffusion of economic development by means of some simple statistical tests on data for the state of Georgia.