Winners and Losers

This article examines some of the main features and causes of the changing geography of inequality and unequal development in the European Union (EU). The main spatial inequalities in the EU and the wider Europe are outlined, as are some of the trends in regional inequality since the early 1960s and their relation to economic performance. Considerable emphasis is placed on evidence of the dysfunctionality of wide inequalities for economic development, and it is argued that a neo-liberal programme of market integration and an intensification of competition for investment creates a zero-sum gain in which the gains of the winners are often at the expense of the losers. An initial attempt is made to identify some of the winners and losers of the late 1970s and 1980s and to identify some of the factors that help explain why some regions were more successful than others.