Economic development would mean better GDP, diverse occupation patterns and economic sectors, higher per capita incomes, better housing conditions, greater revenue collection and spending by the local governments and overall better education and health scores. Spatial development would mean better infrastructure, access to amenities and services, land cover change, overall growth in population, higher road density, better health and education infrastructure (also belong here) etc. These respective indictors, although may be subjective, they were corroborated with literature review to make sure they indeed mean economic and spatial development. The objective here was to see when an area develops economically, does it also translate to spatial development in the settlements in general.
To study this two highly developed districts of Karnataka were considered. Among the districts of Karnataka, the two districts: Dakshina Kannada and Udupi rank among the highest in Human Development Index (HDI), per-capita GDP and gross GDP and attract a lot of FDI (especially DK district with many industries). Two taluk (sub-district) of Mangalore and Karkala rank high in development indices as well. Between the decade of 1991 and 2001 (as the 2011 data for necessary information hadn’t yet been released by Census 2011, I had to take the decade previous to the 2001), the two districts have seen a change towards a more diverse occupation pattern and changes in hierarchy of settlements (from few to multiple regional centres).
Multi-variable regresion for the settlements gave no significant results. However, when grouped by their hierarchy, higher order settlements showed significant R sqauared values for infrastructure scores with income and expenditure of the local governments. Lower order settlements showed no results of significance. The interesting thing to note here is that the order (hierarchy) of settlements depended not on the population size but the order of amenities that were present there. I have speculated that majority of the economic development has not been translated to spatial development except in higher order settlement. Remittences may also play a role here as economic development may also be due to external factors.