The conversation now has turned toward a review of a paper on the overview of urban economic development of the past 40 years. The conference participants are adding their own input to this briefing paper, providing specific examples from their own experience and challenging or adding to the historical conclusions of the paper.
But for the lay person, I'd like to start with defining economic development. I've skimmed over the paper now and I think it assumes that everyone knows exactly what we're talking about.
As far as I can tell, "economic development" basically refers to any action or legislation by government - local, state or federal - that is intended, either directly or indirectly, to lead to the creation of new employment opportunities.
Sometimes these strategies and actions work. Sometimes they fail miserably. The paper, which I'll summarize later, gives a lot of example where the unintended consequence of a government action was the direct opposite of economic development in urban areas.
One participant just defined economic development as previously being "smokestack chasing" or business attraction and retention - which simply wasn't working. She then added that it had to evolve to mean "quality of life" as well - making areas livable so that people and businesses would desire to locate in a certain place.
Comments (2)
some economic development works...please expand on what has been considered to work, how and why.
Posted by mdcphilly | October 8, 2007 5:59 PM
it as been a great proplem for the growth of economics development...but i must say today that the really problem cauing economics development is the overpopulation in our envivroment...it as been notice that the population in our environment is more than the resource we have avaiable..
THE SOLUTION TO THIS PROBLEM
IT WILL BE A SERIOURS SOLUTION THAT WILL EFFECT MOST PEOPLE BUT WE CAN JUST PROGESS LIKE THIS ....
1 IF OUR HEAD CAN AGREE TO KILL THEMSELF AND LET THE UPCOMING ONES RUN THINGS THEM SELF..MANY PEOPLE WILL LOOK AT THIS POINT AND LAUGH...BUT THIS WILL HAVE BEEN THE BEST SOLUTION ANYBODY
Posted by ojora oladimeji | October 12, 2007 2:46 PM