REGIONAL INEQUITY AND SOVIET CONCERN FOR RURAL AND SMALL-TOWN INDUSTRALIZATION
Regional inequity has been an important national issue in most industrial societies. Measures to reduce inequity usually include the location of more industries in rural and small-town areas. The USSR has always possessed a strong ideologically based concern for regional inequity, but it was not until the 1960's that the matter was given serious attention. The last three five-year plans have called for more industry in small towns and rural villages. Life in these areas is to be made more attractive, labor resources more fully utilized, local economies improved, and the out- migration of people reduced. However, there are obvious barriers to industrialization in rural and small-town areas, and as in most industrial nations, the reduction of regional inequity is a slow and difficult process.
INDUSTRIAL DISPERSION IN THE SOVIET UNION: AN APPLICATION OF ENTROPY MEASURES
Industrial dispersion across the republics of the USSR between 1926 and 1974 is described through the use of entropy measures. Ostensibly, a set of location principles would guide such dispersion, and several of them stress regional equalization as an important consideration in locating industry. Therefore, trends in regional inequality (in industrialization) are investigated through the use of inequality statistics derived from entropy measures at three different spatial scales. Between 1926 and 1960, inequality among the republics decreased, but has increased between 1960 and 1974. However, inequality has decreased between the economic regions of the USSR between 1940 and 1975, and at the oblast level, there has been a tendency toward greater equality (homogeneity) within each economic region or republic since 1960. In attempting to account for these diverse trends, it is suggested that they are largely the result of the priority of efficiency considerations in location decisions rather than those of re...
The General Theory of Relativity
THE WORD “SPECIAL” IN “SPECIAL THEORY OF RELATIVITY” means that the theory is restricted to those frames of reference for which the law of inertia holds, that is, inertial frames of reference.* Einstein sometimes referred to them as Galilean frames of reference. At first glance, it does not seem reasonable to expect that the principle of relativity can be extended to non-inertial frames. The reasons are fairly obvious. The principle of relativity that we have been using states that the laws of physics have the same form in all frames of reference to which the principle applies. In other words there should be no way to determine by an experiment which of two frames of reference is in motion relative to the other.