Regional development and regional planning in the countries of the Third World

Acceleration of socio-economic progress and the achievement of self-reliant economy by the developing countries are closely linked with transformation of sectoral and spatial structure of colonial type economy, which is characterized by nonintegration, extreme inequalities in resources and land utilization, and regional disparities in the levels of socio-economic development. The State plays the leading role in this process through elaboration and realization of long-term regional policy and regional planning, the necessity of which is admitted in the majority of the developing countries. Their scientific substantiation is connected with investigation of objective process of formation of the spatial structure of the new type economy. The latter is formed in the process of interaction of the major regionalization systems: natural-resources, demography-ethnic, socio-economic (systems of special sector-wise and integral-complex regions are embedded in these systems). The systems of socio-economic regionalization are the most dynamic and manageable. But the modern stage of the development of the Third World countries is characterized by the essential changes of other regionalization systems as well. Evaluation of disproportional correlations in their interaction and elaboration of measures to reduce them constistute one of the most important objects of modern geography. Specialization of economic regions in the productions, which have favourable regional combinations of resources results in acceleration of economic growth because of the benefits of spatial division of labour. At the same time regional specialization and increase of inter-regional linkages strengthens the integration on all-national scale, which is of vital importance for the developing countries. The acute, not only economic but also socio-political problem of rapid backward areas advancement can and must be solved not separately (although such attempts have been undertaken often enough) but as a part of the general strategy of regional development. Scientific substantiation of the effective regional planning in the developing countries is an object of interdisciplinary research, where geographers are called to play the leading role.