Kaldor's 1970 Regional Growth Model Revisited

Kaldor's 1970 paper ‘The Case for Regional Policies’ was republished in the 60th anniversary volume of the Scottish Journal of Political Economy. This article reflects on the model after more than 40 years, and argues that although it has been criticized for its deterministic nature, it has lost none of its relevance. It predates the ideas of so-called ‘new’ growth theory, and the new economic geography of Krugman, and provides at least a partial explanation of why growth rates and levels of per capita income between regions and between countries can continue to persist and even widen in contrast to the predictions of orthodox equilibrium theory.