William Ogilvie,the Klondike Borderlands and the Making of the Canadian West

This article focuses on William Ogilvie, the Canadian Dominions Surveyor and Commissioner of the Yukon during one of the most formative periods in Canadian history—the opening of the Yukon Territories during the Klondike Gold Rush. By the mid-1890s, Canadian and American miners flooded the Yukon–Alaska border in search of gold. The mass migration of American miners created anxieties among Canadian officials who believed Americans would forcibly annex the Yukon Territories. In light of this, Ogilvie was tasked with clarifying the contested boundary line and establishing economic links across the Atlantic to Great Britain in order to secure the Canadian boundary and maintain Canadian authority on the frontier. In 1898, Ogilvie left for Great Britain to tie Canada more closely to the British Empire and, effectively, sell the Yukon to potential British investors. This article thus speaks to issues in the North American borderlands and Atlantic history.     

Patterns of Regional Inequality in Transition Economies

This paper provides a comparative account of important aspects of regional development in transition economies, on the basis of regional statistics available for Poland, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria. More specifically it examines the geographical pattern of disparities, the convergence/divergence trends that have taken place at the regional level and the relation of regional disparities to the process of transition. It is found that spatial adjustments under transition favour metropolitan and western regions, especially in countries sharing common borders with the European Union (EU) and being a short distance from the European core. In addition, disparities have increased at various rates and degrees in transition countries to levels that are higher than most of the EU countries. Given that the catch-up process, which favours more often efficiency than equity policies, has a long way to go, the regional problems in these countries may take alarming, by EU standards, dimensions.