The Ethics of Regional Policy

In the beginning, the economy was closed to ethics and as a social science had a moral dimension. However, after the marginal revolution and during the twentieth century, ethics was not considered in the economic analysis. Fortunately, this situation changed at the end of the past century. This paper analyzes the ethics of regional policy. Regional policy has an ethics dimension because its main goals are to reduce the differences among regions and to redistribute income. The objective of this paper is to analyze the relationship between regional policy and ethics, considering both targets and instruments. We will consider, mainly, the case of the European Union.