increase in incomes has been proportionally less. On the other hand, globalization
has seemingly increased the degree of spatial inequalitywithinthese emerging
economies. In China, for example, the development of the Special Economic
Zones (SEZs) along the coast has resulted in a dramatic rise in China’s integration
with the global economy. As a result, personal incomes in most of the SEZs are
much higher than in many other parts of China, a fact of China’s economic geog-
raphy that has led to greater spatial inequality in the country. A similar increase in
spatial inequality has occurred in India, where incomes in urban areas have risen
much faster than inrural settlements, partially as a result of outsourcing and
the emergence of high-tech industries in many Indian cities. Some economic geog-
raphers argue that such increases in spatial inequality are not necessarily a nega-
tive development, because while urban incomes have increased most rapidly,all
incomes have been rising, increasing living standards as a whole.
Economic spatial inequality is also a phenomenon of developed countries, and in
fact has been studied by scholars longer in these regions than in the developing
world. In developed countries spatial inequality is frequency a function of differen-
tial rates of economic growth between regions, due to a variety of factors. For exam-
ple, in the United States in the early 20th century, many urban areas in the upper
Midwest, located in what today is called the rust belt, were growing rapidly. Many
of these cities had developed clusters of heavy industry due to transportation advan-
tages or throughagglomeration.Alocationadjacent to the Great Lakes, providing
cheap water transportation, was a distinct benefit to the growth of Chicago, Milwau-
kee, Detroit, Cleveland, and other cities. Other parts of the region, however,
remained badly underdeveloped, like the Appalachian Highlands of West Virginia
and eastern Kentucky and Tennessee. The latter regions were some of the poorest
sections of the country, with much lower income levels than surrounding areas.
Much of the back country of the Appalachians was not even serviced by electricity
in the 1920s, and standards of health care and education there were well below the
national average. During the 1930s the U.S. government pursued policies to raise
living standards in the highland region and reduce the spatial inequality in the
eastern section of the country. Ironically, the old manufacturing belt today is losing
its status and falling behind some of the other regions of the country. Spatial
inequality is dynamic and can quickly shift in the modern globalized world.Spatial Interaction Models
Geographers who study the flow of phenomena across space, especially if such
flows are organized and occur via networks, are interested in conceptualizing the318 Spatial Interaction Models