25
regions IP2 is primarily composed of the Grecian Islands of Voreio Aigaio and Notio Aigaio. Of
these two, the former has two urban centres with a total population of 50,000 or more, while the latter
has only one. Finally, both Finland and France have a peripheral island region in the IP4 category. The
French island of Corsica has two urban centres, each with a total population less than 20,000. In
contrast to this, the Finish peripheral island region of Aland, which lies halfway between Finland and
Sweden, does not have an urban centre at all.
5.2 EU Geography Ex Post 1992
Europe 1992 desegmented the European markets by removing non-tariff barriers. Table 4
shows the reclassification of periphery regions into adjacent regions after the removal of these
barriers. The reclassification pertains to those member state’s peripheral-border-regions that border on
foreign core regions before the removal of trade barriers.
[Figure 6]
Without these trade barriers, such periphery regions fall into the first concentric circle of the
foreign core region, thereby changing their classification to that of an adjacent region by virtue of the
concentric circle definition of regions. Their connectivity16 to a foreign core region encourages the
spread of economic linkages (Krugman and Venables, 1996). These regions can now evolve into
growth regions, since they provide an expansion path for industry wishing to relocate out of the core.
Alternatively, the regions become target regions for new firms wishing to locate close to a core region.
Reclassification has resulted in the creation of eighteen new adjacent regions, and the elimination of
an equal number of periphery regions. Furthermore, the number of adjacent regions has increased from
sixty-nine to eighty-seven, with the major additions occurring in the A1 category.
The major beneficiary of the reclassification has been France, where the status of seven of its
twelve periphery regions changed, because of their contiguity to the core regions of Belgium, Spain,
Germany, and Italy. In the other EU member states, the following changes in classification from
16 Given the similarity in the population density elements in the subsets A and P, as specified by equations (3a) and (4a), a
periphery region’s connectivity to a core region eliminates the distance criterion from the equations for these regions.
Therefore, by virtue of the similarity in the subset criterion elements, the periphery regions are respectively classified into
adjacent regions.