Latest Research Featured in Economic Development Quarterly
November 2025; volume 39 issue 4 https://journals.sagepub.com/home/edq
The November issue of Economic Development Quarterly highlights two significant developments in economic development policy and practice. In addition, it offers two data-driven research efforts: one examining future occupational demand in energy and the other evaluating business closures in minority neighborhoods.
Steven Deller argues that there is a new and growing trend in state and local government economic development policy, moving from business attraction to improving the area’s quality of life. In his paper, “Are We at an Inflection Point in Community Economic Development? The 4th Wave,” Deller suggest that more regional economic development programs are addressing the question “What can we do to make this a better place to live and work?” His finding that jobs tend to follow people is based on a Carlino-Mills model using data from 1970 to 2020. He carefully notes that communities are continuing the business attraction initiative, but at the same time are striving to make their communities attractive to future residents, as well.
An interview of Deller discussing and highlighting the findings of his paper is available at https://youtu.be/UCnyU3byXhg.
Kshitiz Khanal, Nikhil Kaza, and Nichola Lowe, in their paper “Occupational Transitions into Clean Energy: A Workforce Development Approach Using Occupational Similarity and Unsupervised Clustering,” examine the use of text-similarity-based occupational metrics to identify short-term retraining programs that meet the needs of new clean energy jobs. The study supports the use of the ONET database as a “reconnaissance framework” of workforce development in the evolving energy field. The authors find that 250 occupations can transition to clean energy occupations with retraining. Moreover, they found that 85% of clean energy occupations have higher than average wages and face positive growth projections.
In another data-based research paper, Shan Yang and Yasuyuki Motoyama carefully examine the possible impact of COVID-19 on business closures at the census-tract level in six MSAs in “How Much Were Minority Neighborhoods in the United States Affected During COVID-19 in the Aspect of Business Closure Rates? Evidence From Six Metropolitan Areas.” Their analysis did not uncover a statistically significant connection between the percentage of specific minority groups and business closure rates in these MSAs during the pandemic. Although the findings were inconclusive, the paper increases our understanding of the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on business activity in minority neighborhoods.
The issue’s sole commentary welcomes the increasing number of quality evaluations of state and local economic development programs. Chaaron Pearson, Alison Wakefield, Logan Timmerhoff, Elizabeth Gray, and Jeff Chapman, in “States Take the Lead in Evaluating and Improving Tax Incentives,” found that a “sea change” in the number of state (two-thirds) and local areas conduct solid evaluations of their major economic development incentive programs. The authors argue that this new focus on quality evaluation will better inform policy makers to design and fund more effective incentive programs in the future. One of the more interesting evaluation programs they reviewed was on the Rebuild Rhode Island Tax Credit Act and Rhode Island Tax Increment Financing Act of 2015. The evaluators estimate that the break-even point for job creation was a “but-for” percentage of 6.8%. In other words, the program only had to be effective 6.8% of the time to be beneficial.
The November issue includes three book reviews. In his review of Labour Law and Economic Policy by Todolí-Signes, Adrián Muhammad Rozali notes that the author makes a strong argument that deregulation of labor markets may not boost efficiency, as it also increases mistrust, instability, and insecurity and harms an innovative work environment.
Ikpe Akpan reviews A.N. Link and A.C. O’Connor’s Small Business Innovation in the Public Interest: A Study of the US National Institutes of Health, which he strongly recommends—a must read for people interested in public policy role in science innovation. He believes the book's greatest strength is its data-driven assessment of the impact of NIH-supported small business innovation programs.
Finally, Jay D. Gatrell reviews, and highly endorses, Mirya R. Holman’s book The Hidden Face of Local Power: Appointed Boards and the Limits of Democracy. The book examines the historical development of policy boards in cities. “The author…underscores inherent limitations of boards by providing the reader with a rich understanding of the structural dynamics of race, growth, capital, and party politics—and the ways in which policy regimes reproduce critical structural relationships across urban space.”