Single European market and the new geography of development in Greece

Abstract

The challenges of European integration and industrial restructuring reshape the geography of development in Greece. The country enters in the Single European Market with a series of different local and regional productive systems, including the dynamic new industrial space of northern Greece. A first priority for regional policy and planning should be to sustain the technological capability and competitiviness of these local/regional systems. The article discusses consequentively the economic disparities and the determinants of competitiviness in objective 1 regions of the European Union (part 1), the crisis of development in Greece during the 1980s (part 2), the new geography of development, including the transfer of dynamism to the North, the eindustrialisatton-reindustrialisation processes, and the formation of the new industrial space of northern Greece (part 3). It concludes by examining policies and planning which could enhance the competitiviness in the SEM of the differentiated regional systems, and argues in favour of decentralisation of decision making and self-organisation of the various local productive systems.