Background
LASUEN, Jose-Ramon was born in 1932 in Alcaniz (Teruel), Spain.
LASUEN, Jose-Ramon was born in 1932 in Alcaniz (Teruel), Spain.
Bachelor of Arts, Doctor of Philosophy Madrid University, 1954, 1959. Master of Arts Stanford University, 1957. Honorary Doctor of Philosophy World Academy Scholars, 1965.
Assistant Professor, Madrid University,
60. Professor, University Barcelona, 1960-1966. Research Association, Resources for the Future, Washington, District of Columbia, 1967-1969.
Professor, Dean, School Economics and Business Administration, Autonomous University Madrid, 1970-1983,
3.
Member of Parliament, 1977-1979. Economics Adviser President of Spain, 1977-1978.
Member of Parliament, Economics Spokesman Liberal-Conservative Coalition, Congreso de los Diputados, Madrid, Spain, since 1983. Editorial Board, European Economic Review, 1977.
My main interest is the study of the interaction between regional and national development processes. First works in the 1960s
dealt with the effects of regional income disparities on national growth. They showed that regional inequalities were inimical to national development because they segmented aggregate demand into too large a number of internal sectors.
Later works showed that indiscriminate regional incomes equalisation policies were also unfavourable to development because national growth results from the adaptation of international growth patterns in certain regions, which must register faster growth than the rest of the country. Both excessive regional divergence and convergence can be hostile to growth.
In the 1970s my attention focussed on how to maximise the benefits and minimise the costs of regional differentiation. I found that nations are structured around a stable and hierarchical system of ‘growth poles’, which act as adaptors and diffusors of international innovations.
In consequence, maximum national growth can be attained through long-term policies which induce the higher-order poles faster to adopt international innovations and also to diffuse them faster to lowerorder poles. By the end of the decade I showed that these policies, which are natural in ‘normal’ countries, where the higher-order growth poles are also the dominant political centres, are very difficult to apply in other ‘inverted’ countries, where the political centres are the economic peripheries. In the 1980s, as a consequence, my research was addressed to find out which political instruments, decentralisation schemes, inter-party alliances, et cetera, can be used to make ‘inverted’ countries behave ‘normally’, using regional policies conducive to national growth, and vice versa.