Regional Winners and Losers From Recent Trends in Utility Rationalization

An important element of the economic strategy of successive UK governments since the early 1980s has been the privatization of state assets, especially the nationalized industries. Like a number of other policy initiatives introduced initially in the UK, this has been progessively adopted across other parts of the developed world in the following years. However, although there has been an extensive literature on such aspects of this movement as the forms of new ownership adopted, the costs and benefits to users, suppliers and taxpayers, and on the wider implications of these changes, the spatial dimensions to these developments have received relatively scant attention. The article by Peter Gripaios and Max Munday in this issue of Debates and Surveys attempts to explore not only the initial aspects of the privatization of the utilities, in particular, but also, more significantly, the recent trends in their subsequent rationalization. They demonstrate that there have been profound changes in all sectors, but that the biggest effects have been relatively concentrated at different levels in the urban hierarchy, with winners and losers located according to certain spatial factors. The further impacts of these changes on the ability of some regions to promote indigenous economic development echo much of the literature on branch plants, on the concentration of power in certain enterprises and localities, and on the vicious and virtuous circles of growth and decline.