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The purpose of this paper is to describe two major influences on business operations, and how they may be merged and used to create a conceptually unified and focused framework for economic development policies.
INTRODUCTION
Regional economic development (RED) policy-making is a pervasive practice. All states in the US have regional economic development (RED) policies and programs and almost all have diversified RED policies (Business Facilities 1992). Furthermore, most metropolitan areas have RED organizations that are implementing RED policies.
It is no surprise that among states RED policies are incredibly diverse. In 1984, the Office of Technology Assessment identified 153 different state government RED policies (Office of Technology Assessment 1984). Currently, there are over 250 programs (Atkinson 1991, p. 33). Closer inspection of state RED programs further reveals not only diversity by numbers but more importantly, by content. The complexity of RED policies is a fact; the question addressed by this article is -- are they coherent? Reviews by various researchers have pointed out that, in general, RED policies need better coherence (Fosler 1992; Leicht and Jenkins 1994).
The coherence, or lack thereof, of RED policies are affected by two major elements: I ) the operational element which includes organizational and political dynamics (Atkinson 1991; Rubin 1989), and 2) the content element which refers to issues of practical soundness of the policy (Fosler 1992). This article focuses on the latter. While political and organizational dynamics in RED policymaking can, and often do, cause serious policy changes or implementation problems (for example, a switch of political parties in control of the state government), lack of sound content automatically leads to ineffectiveness. The lack of correct content is akin to relying on statistical analysis for policy analysis wherein the assumptions of random statistics have been violated. No matter how elegant the techniques, the outcome will always be wrong because of incorrect assumptions, or in the case of RED policy-making, content.
In the spirit of the Third Wave of RED policy-making as outlined by Fosler (1992), there is a need to reconsider RED policies under the emerging influences global competitiveness. Fosler (1992) argues that the current, sophisticated second-wave of RED policies must be enhanced to a third-wave which considers the forces affecting business as well as economic...