There are two sources of regional development theories; one is diffusion theory, the other is dependencia. Diffusion theory explains that innovation diffusion takes the role of development, and the mechanism of innovation diffusion will achieve prospe...
There are two sources of regional development theories; one is diffusion theory, the other is dependencia. Diffusion theory explains that innovation diffusion takes the role of development, and the mechanism of innovation diffusion will achieve prosperity of lagging region in a spatial system in a nation. Urban centers of the nation will spin off innovations to peripheral area. They believe that development process will follow stage and cycle as the manner of the innovation diffusion. However less developed countries still stay in poor status, because LDCs do not yet gear in an appropriate stage of development. In order to speed up development in LDCs, they emphasize to interact with more developed countries. In the spatial organization, urban centers are responsible for spreading the innovation diffusion to peripheral regions.
However, empirical researches do not support that the mechanism of innovation diffusion brings about development in lagging regions, and moreover the mechanism has increased disparities between urban centers and rural areas. Growth center theory is known a device to curb the growth of primate city and to stimulate ba1anced development by means of allocation of propulsive units such as institutions, plants, and industrial complexes in the lagging region.
The growth pole policy is abandoned by LBCs, because the growth pole did not carry out the role of spread effects to the periphery.
Dependencia has examined why poor countries stay in poor and rich countries in rich. That is, the rich countries exploit poor peripheral countries in a mechanisn of world market economies. In this context, LDCs inevitably depends upon more developed countries, consequently developed countries have continued their dominance in a relationship with less developed countries, and do not release worthy innovations to peripheral countries. Therefore, they criticize that the more developed countries or regions in a spatial organization remain a dominant situation, and center-periphery relationship perpetuates as time goes by. However, dependecia can not explain regional growth as well as national growth such as Taiwan and Korea which both countries heavily depend on Japan and United States in the world market system.
Both Diffusion and dependencia theories argue one side of development sets, but did not look into whole sets of mechanism of development. Regional development of peripheral region should be approached by both perspectives alternatively. It implies that measures of market mechanism and government interferences are required simultaneously to carry out successful development. Future research in this field is asked to develope a new model of governmental interference in the market system.