In this article, a composite leading indicator of employment conditions is constructed for the Milwaukee, Wisconsin metropolitan area. This index contains both purely local data series and several national data series. After describing the process for constructing this index, we explored its...

States have been adopting a variety of economic intervention strategies intended to stimulate growth in the small business sector. This study uses an interrupted time-series analysis to test the hypothesis that growth in the small business establishment sector of a state's economy can be...

The authors examine labor organizing around the training issue in the United States and the United Kingdom. The best practice examples presented are the Machine Action Project in Springfield, Massachusetts, and the Inverclyde Training Trust in the Glasgow, Scotland region. In both cases, labor...

State venture capital programs, using public money to make high-risk equity investments in innovative firms in order to generate jobs, proliferated in the 1980s. A state by state follow-up survey of an earlier effort reveals that by the beginning of the 1990s, however, there was a shakeout in...

This article explores the effects of institutionalized access to economic development decision making using data from a 1989 survey conducted by the International City Management Association. The results demonstrate that the importance of institutionalized access is contingent on both the wealth...

This article sets small business start-up training initiatives within the context of other strategies used to serve displaced workers, and then proceeds to describe and evaluate a recent programmatic effort of this type. The evaluation is based on a two-year postprogram follow-up of participants...

There is widespread civic concern about the gap between local economic development promises and outcomes, particularly for business incentives made available by local jurisdictions. This article examines how this problem results from the design limitations of local economic development policy,...

Many state and local economic development groups have attempted to create environments that are conducive to the expansion and growth of "high-tech" industry clusters based on the commonly held notion that high-tech clusters offer advantages over other types of industrial activity. There have...

The increasing number of Japanese manufacturing plants locating in the United States presents new opportunities for state and local economic development policy. This article compares the location decisions of Japanese start-ups in manufacturing with counterpart domestic industry and concludes...

The purpose of this article is to compare compensation costs for Canadian and U.S. workers to evaluate how relative compensation costs may affect firm location decisions with the implementation of the Free Trade Agreement. Using data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Labour Division of...