Latest Research Featured in Economic Development Quarterly
Catherine Brinkley and Marjory Anne Visser in their paper, “Socioeconomic and Environmental Indicators for Rural Communities: Bridging the Scholarly and Practice Gap,” summarize the efforts of six rural regions during the past 30 years in constructing a useful set of economic indicators to monitor their local economies. In addition, they contrast these regional efforts with the indicators suggested by the rural wealth creation literature. Readers will find their list of social/economic/environmental variables in Table 2 of the report to be extremely useful.
Mikhail Ivonchyk, in his “Local Economic Development Policies and Business Activity: Dynamic Panel Data Analysis of All County Governments in the State of Georgia,” compares the usage of economic development incentives in rural and urban counties. Overall, he finds that none of the monitored business incentives are statistically associated with firm employment or payroll. However, his analysis suggests that industrial revenue bonds are associated with significantly more businesses per capita and are used more often in rural areas than urban areas on a per-firm basis.
Seattle phased in its $15 minimum wage from 2018 to 2021; it currently stands at $17.27. Mahesh Somashekhar, James Buszkiewicz, Scott Allard, and Jennifer Romich, in their paper “Employers Belonging to Marginalized Communities Respond to Minimum Wage Increases? The Case of Immigrant-Owned Businesses in Seattle,” examine the important question of whether minority-, immigrant-, or women-owned business are more impacted by the established of a local minimum wage. Using a unique survey of Seattle businesses conducted by the city, the authors find that these firms, overall, responded to the city’s $15 per hour minimum wage no differently than other businesses. Nevertheless, their analysis suggests that immigrant-owned franchisees were more likely to pass the increased wage costs to customers to protect their non-familial workers more than other firms.
Clearly, COVID-19 negatively impacted businesses nationwide; the question is if some areas were hit harder than others. Yasuyuki Motoyama, in his article “Is COVID-19 Causing More Business Closures in Poor and Minority Neighborhoods?” combines InfoGroup Historic Business Data and Google Map API to analyze business closures at the neighborhood level in Columbus, Ohio. He finds that businesses in poor minority neighborhoods were no more impacted by COVID-19 than in other neighborhoods. In fact, businesses in Latinx neighborhoods had lower closure rates.
The May issue of EDQ also features two book reviews:
The Mismeasure of Progress: Economic Growth and its Critics by S. Macekura (Reviewed by Gordon F. Mulligan)
The Innovation Stack: Building an Unbeatable Business One Crazy Idea at a Time by J. McKelvey (Reviewed by Florence Neymotin)
The latest issue of Economic Development Quarterly (EDQ) is now available online at https://journals.sagepub.com/home/edq.