Categories of Local Economic Development: An Empirical Analysis

Abstract

In examining local economic development incentives, scholars have found it useful to employ typologies of development practices. Such typologies have been based on assumptions that techniques reflect functional categories, such as marketing and financial incentives, or can be organized by the nature of costs and benefits, or by the nature of incentive goals. While useful heuristic devices, little effort has been made to test these typologies empirically. This research note provides an empirically based typology of local economic development incentives, using data from 967 cities collected by the International City Management Association.

Competition and Cooperation: Local Government Joint Ventures for Economic Development

“…11 11 These policies are based on previous research on economic development policy adoption (see Reese, 1993). A count of the number of economic development policies has been used to indicate development activity and competition among local governments (see Fleischmann et al, 1992; Green & Fleishmann, 1991; Neiman & Fernandez, 1999; Sharp, 1991).…”

Governance, Policy Innovation, and Local Economic Development in North Carolina

“…7 7 Using factor analysis, Rubin (1986) reduced a list of 18 city economic development activities to two factors, one comprised of internal actions and the other more externally oriented. Reese (1993) used factor analysis to sort 55 development policy tools used in U.S. cities and observed 13 distinct factors related to marketing, finance, land, governance, and infrastructure. Miranda and Rosdil's (1995) factor analysis produced five categories: pro‐market, qualitative growth, historic preservation, environmentally harmful growth, and redistributive growth. …”

Collaborative Policy Making and Administration: The Operational Demands of Local Economic Development

“…To conceptually organize the broad array of instruments available to cities, 63 of the development instruments listed on the two surveys have been classified into one of five operations-based scales. 2 Although development instrument classification schemes in the literature are based on development function (Eisinger, 1988;Hanson & Berkman, 1991;Reese, 1993), pursuit of goals (Pelissero & Fasenfest, 1989), and governmental roles (Clingermayer & Feiock, 1990;Rubin, 1986), most neglect operational concerns. The classification employed in this research is based on the differences in institutional structures across each instrument type.…”

“…This design revolution has resulted in countless new mechanisms for affecting local economies. Researchers have diligently catalogued and classified these instruments (Clarke & Gaile, 1989;Eisinger, 1988;Fleischmann, Green, & Kwong, 1992;Hanson & Berkman, 1991;McGuire, 1999;Pelissero & Fasenfest, 1989;Reese, 1993;Sternberg, 1987) and evaluated their effectiveness (Bartik, 1989(Bartik, , 1991Bowman, 1988;Clarke & Gaile, 1992;Gross & Phillips, 1997;Marlin, 1990). In addition to identifying new instruments, some scholars have argued that the emergence of certain types of instruments and strategies constitutes the foundation for entirely new approaches to local economic development policy (Clarke & Gaile, 1989, 1992Eisinger, 1988Eisinger, , 1995Ross & Friedman, 1991).…”

“…For example, adopting endogenous development policy instruments is an emergent approach to local development (Teitz, 1994). Endogenous policy instruments, referred to elsewhere as demand-side policies (Eisinger, 1988;McGuire, 1999;Reese, 1993Reese, , 1997, focus on promoting the development and expansion of indigenous firms, capitalizing on the strengths and assets of the city, and growing economic activity from within the city rather than through luring mobile capital. Such instruments are designed to facilitate the process of growth and development by launching new enterprises, creating new technology and products, and identifying new markets for new and existing products (Leicht & Jenkins, 1994).…”