Modeling Agglomeration and Dispersion in City and Country: Gunnar Myrdal, Francois Perroux, and the New Economic Geography - Critical Essay

American Journal of Economics and Sociology, The, Jan, 2001 by Stephen J. Meardon

But due to enthusiasm for the concept among regional planners, agglomeration became its predominant application. Jaques Boudeville (1966) was an influential author who employed "regional operational models," including regional input-output matrices, in an effort to develop the regional application of growth poles. Boudeville further-more advocated the implementation of planned poles in France by means of regionally targeted investment in public services and financial incentives to private industry. Outside of Perroux's home territory, Harry W. Richardson and Margaret Richardson (1975) discussed generally similar growth pole strategies in Chile, Peru, Venezuela, Colombia, Bolivia, Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico. A volume edited by Kuklinski (1972) includes chapters applying the growth pole concept to regional policy in Canada, India, Libya, Poland, Sweden, and Tanzania. The appeal of the regional application of growth poles was world-wide--and owed much to the intellectual framework it provided for state plann ing that would have happened, in some fashion, one way or another. "Growth poles," wrote Friedmann and Forest (1988, p. 117), "emerged as the central planning doctrine."

Research and advocacy of planned regional poles expanded from the 1960s through the mid-1970s. During the research program's ascendancy, insufficient attention may have been paid to the question of whether planned poles were equivalent to poles that had evolved independent of planning, or for that matter whether poles could be planned successfully in the first place (Parr 1999, p. 1198). These matters of confusion and others contributed to disappointment with growth pole strategies in the mid to late 1970s, which in turn led to a decline in the influence of the growth pole concept. [10]

Perroux, however, became ever more interested in the regional application of his ideas. Shortly before his death he prepared an essay (Perroux 1988a) for a conference held in his honor on regional economic development. This essay may be the most complete exposition he made of the geographical application of growth poles.

To demonstrate "in a first approximation" an application of the growth pole concept in geographical space, Perroux posits a large multinational firm operating in a developing country either on its own or through a subsidiary. Inside of the firm's territorial space, T, it acts within an "operations space" and, more narrowly, a "decision space." The multinational firm shares its territorial space with agricultural units, small industries, commercial shops, local public services, and individuals. Market interactions between the multinational and selected subsets of the smaller units are called "itineraries," or channels; they are represented by arrows (running from the dominant to the dominated units) in Perroux's "diagram of channels," shown in Figure 2. The main transport and communication routes also appear in the diagram.

What does figure 2 reveal, and how does it tie into the rest of Perroux's thought? As he explains it,