A Path to Smarter Federal Leadership in Economic Development: Learning, Leveraging, and Linking

Dick Thornburgh
Additional contact information
Dick Thornburgh: National Academy of Public Administration

Economic Development Quarterly, 1998, vol. 12, issue 4, 291-298

Abstract: A panel of the National Academy of Public Administration proposes refraining the federal role in economic development. Drawing on field research in 10 communities, the panel found that federal efforts often suffer from fixation on small, unrelated projects that may benefit one community or constituency but, in the aggregate, do not add up to much. The panel proposes that federal development policy focus on (a) learning-creating a better understanding about how state, regional, and local economies function and about which development strategies work best; (b) leveraging-providing incentives to counteract pressures on state and local development activities to focus on highly visible projects in prosperous areas rather than on long-term regional development strategies that would benefit disadvantaged as well as prosperous people; and (c) linking-consolidating federal programs and making it easier for states and regions to obtain the flexibility to use federal resources effectively.

Date: 1998
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/089124249801200401 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:ecdequ:v:12:y:1998:i:4:p:291-298

DOI: 10.1177/089124249801200401

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Economic Development Quarterly
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().