Harald Bathelt

Social scientists and policymakers alike have become increasingly concerned with understanding the nature, causes, and consequences of inter-regional inequality in economic living conditions. Contemporary spatial inequality is multi-faceted—it varies depending on how we define inequality, the scale at which it is measured, and which groups in the labor force are considered. Increasing economic inequality has important implications for broader social and political issues. Notably, it is difficult to account for the rise of far-right populism in industrialized countries without considering the context of growing inter-regional inequality. Important explanations for the rise in inter-regional inequality include changing patterns of worker and firm sorting processes across space, major transitions like the reorientation of the economy from manufacturing to digital technologies, and increasing global economic integration, as well as policy. Different causal explanations in turn imply a different role for place-based policy. This article introduces the context of the special issue on the nature, causes, and consequences of inter-regional inequality, focusing specifically on inequality in North America and Western Europe, and aims to identify challenges for, and spark further research on, inter-regional inequality.

Research identifies strong concentrations of economic activity in dynamic, major city regions, whereas shifts in economic linkages between these and smaller, less-advantaged city regions have been less investigated. Using data on firms’ investment/disinvestment decisions between 1993 and 2017, we show that the majority of ‘relational hinterlands’ (smaller, non-contiguous city regions with at least 1 investment tie to a global centre in 1993) in the USA have become disconnected from major US ‘global centres’ (globally integrated city regions). Relational hinterlands which lost connectivity to the global centres are also disadvantaged in many other ways. While global centres have become increasingly connected to other global centres in the USA and abroad, relational hinterlands have become increasingly disconnected from centres of economic growth.