Regional Economic Development

End of year cleaning brought to the surface a 10-year old paper by Ash Amin, University of Durham, on regional economic development. Given the times, it still seems relevant. 

** Policy actions designed to strengthen networks of association are more desirable than those that focus on individual actors.
** Policy action should involve a plurality of decentralized and autonomous organizations since effective economic governance extrends beyond the reach of both state and local institutions.
** The role of the state should be that of providing resources, arbitrating between decentralized authorities, securing collective results and above all, establishing the strategic goal, rather than that of central planner or market facilitator.
** The aim of policy action should be to encourage voice and negotiation, together with procedural and recursive rationalities of behavior, rather than self-serving or rule-following behavior, in order to secure strategic vision, learning and adaptation.
** Solutions have to be context-specific and sensitive to local path dependencies.
** There is a need to encourage intermediate forms of governance, building up to a local institutional thickness which includes enterprise support systems, political institutions and social citizenship.

In Amin's view, there are four novel areas of action which emerge from the "wealth of regions" perspective:

1.  Building clusters and local economies of association.

2.  Learning to learn and adapt (which depends, in part, on the scale and density of 'intelligent' people and institutions)

3.  Broadening and mobilizing the local institutional base

4.  Socially inclusive forms of entrepreneurship and employment. 

He concludes the paper with this important observation: 

"It is nevertheless vital than an approach based on mobilizing the wealth of regions does not degenerate into localist sentiment.  There is a risk that the institutionist turn in regional thought and practice reinforces a parochial optimism centered around the belief that building local capabilities might be sufficient for establishing a privileged position within global networks."  But there are two flaws with this assumption.  "... internal connectivity unattended can quite easily end up reinforcing through institutional lock-in, path-dependencies which are inappropriate for new economic circumstances.  Second,.. the critical factor for economic success is not the presence of local relations of association, and institutional advancement, but the ability of places to anticipate and respond to external circumstances.  Thus it is the management of the region's wider connectivity that is of prime importance, rather than its intrinsic supply site qualities.

  

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