The Geography of De-industrialisation

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London: Macmillan, 1986 — 365 p. — ISBN 0-333-37124-0; 0-333-37125-9.This volume of essays is concerned with the geography of industrial decline in post-war Britain, with the regional anatomy and implications of 'de-industrialisation'. Since it first 'gate-crashed' the economic literature at the end of the 1970s the term 'de-industrialisation' has been used in various ways, both descriptively and analytically, to refer to the most dramatic indicator of Britain's ailing economic performance, the rapid decline in the country's manufacturing base. Whether this decline is measured in terms of the fall in industrial employment, as the progressive deterioration in the balance of manufacturing trade or as the chronic and cumulative elements of a relative and absolute decline in the contribution of manufacturing output, investment, exports and jobs to the national economy, the conclusion isthe same: that since the late 1960s, and especially since the early1970s, British manufacturing has become caught in a process of progressive and accelerating contraction. Moreover, while there is evidence to suggest that the 'British disease' has recently spread to a number of other advanced industrial economies, such as the USA, Canada, France and Germany, in no other country has de-industrialisation been so intense.ContentsDe-industrialisation in BritainThe Legacy Lingers On: The Impact of Britain’s International Role on its Internal GeographyThe Restructuring of the Post-war British Space EconomyWomen’s Work, Technological Change and Shifts in the Employment StructureRegional Dimensions of Industrial DeclineProducing an Industrial Wasteland: Capital, Labour and the State in North-East EnglandThe De-industrialisation of the CityThatcherism and Britain’s Industrial LandscapProducer Services and the Post-industrial Space EconomyRe-industrialisation in Peripheral Britain: State Policy, the Space Economy and Industrial Innovation