The politics of mediating global economic change: Linking the local and the international in Western Europe
Abstract More attention has been paid in the literature to the conceptual than to the methodological issues associated with incorporating the importance of the larger political economy into the politics of urban economic change. The empirical analysis combines an interurban analysis with comparative case studies to link political and economic contexts and changes and their interactions at and between scales. This facilitates a better understanding of the lack of improvement in the prosperity of western Europe's poorest metropolitan regions between the mid 1980s and mid 1990s, despite active efforts by some of these poorer cities to secure public and private funds for economic development in an attempt to mediate the adverse impacts of increased European integration.