Growth Pole

Growth poles are a spatial strategy for economic development centered around a dynamic industry that is geared to jump-start economic development in lagging areas that traditionally have not been major industrial or sector leaders. Unequal growth can be seen as useful in economic development planning because it provides an opportunity to bring what are regarded as unproductive areas into the production realm.

Simplicity is growth pole theory's great appeal, and the strategy became widely employed in urban and regional planning circles throughout the advanced industrial economies as well as in developing nations in Latin America and Asia. The idea originally was conceptualized by French scholar François Perroux in 1955 in an effort to decentralize the French automobile away from the Parisian basin. A decade later, J. R. Boudeville operationalized la notion de pôle de croissance so that slow-growth regions could develop quickly and extend multipliers throughout the rest of the nation's economy. In the United States during the 1960s, a presidential committee led by John D. Rockefeller studied a proposal to decentralize large metropolitan areas by building up medium-sized cities. Although the plan never was implemented because of population-based issues such as sex education and family planning, like the French efforts, it considered “trickle-down” effects to economic development by means of citing jobs and population within the hierarchy of a national urban system. When the Chilean automobile industry tried to decentralize production outside of Santiago into its northern cities during the 1960s and 1970s, many managers and engineers disliked the lack of cultural amenities around these new growth poles. In addition, growth pole development in the Chilean car industry failed to realize that a small domestic automobile market could not offset the vicissitudes of small international sales of European-brand automobiles.

Growth poles often require a judicious mix of public and private support for a propulsive industry. This usually entails supporting a basic industry that has significant forward and backward linkages. One difficult empirical question centers around what the balance between public and private investments should be to create such linkages. On the one hand, the state can encourage public or private investment through tax incentives. On the other hand, no guarantees exist about what those incentives might be, nor are there severe penalties imposed on the private sector if it deviates from industrial policies. Also complicated are the notions of developing appropriate[Page 203] forward and backward linkages in the production sphere so that significant economies of scale accrue to the producers.

Three stages characterize the implementation of a growth pole strategy. The first stage entails locating a propulsive industry within a targeted growth pole. The second (or polarization) stage anticipates backwash effects where the gaps between the center (growth pole) and hinterland (periphery) will actually widen. The third (or spread) stage should produce trickledown benefits between the center and the periphery that ultimately will converge as economic development ensues. Like all stage models, these assumptions are inherently linear and normative and, therefore, will depart from reality in many settings.

Supporters of the growth pole strategy recognize initial drawbacks, including backwash or polarization effects in the hinterland region. Talented workers will leave small towns and rural settings in search of new opportunities in the new industry. Ironically, an undesirable effect may be to exacerbate urban–rural differences and augment the uneven development that growth pole strategies aim to remedy.

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