A change in the economic make-up of a country. It may involve: reordering production to achieve economies of scale; a switch of investment from one sector to another (see deindustrialization); a change in the spatial distribution of industry; or a change in the economic system; see D. Harvey (2005) on the restructuring of capitalism. ‘The tendential “ecological dominance” of neoliberal restructuring strategies…has profoundly disrupted inherited scalar hierarchies, while setting in train new rounds of creative institutional destruction across multiple scales’ (Peck and Theodore (2007) PHG 31, 6; see also N. Brenner et al. (2005) and Jessop (2000) Int. J. Urb. & Reg. Res. 24). ‘Firms emphasizing the social at the expense of the material may require dramatic restructuring during times of crisis when debt, for example, becomes unwieldy’ (Ettlinger (2008) PHG 32, 1). See Clarke et al. (2006) Env. & Plan. A 38 on retail restructuring and consumer choice. Restructuring may be imposed by an authority, like the World Bank, to improve the ailing economy of a nation which is in debt to that authority.