Abstract
For the past 25 years, members of this Association, together with a few select nonmembers, have made major contributions to the theory and measurement of regional economic growth and development and to the development and implementation of regional, state, and local economic development policy. However, the question of whether those theories of regional growth and development can lead to unequivocal policy recommendations for a region like the nonmetropolitan South remains unresolved. Will there continue to be inevitable marketdirected convergence in wages and per capita personal income as predicted by the staunchest neoclassical believers, those described as “neoclassical moonies” by Richardson (see Miernyk, 1982)? Or will the nonmetropolitan South continue forever to be on the end of the product cycle described by Norton and Rees (1979)? Or will the agglomerative and exogeneous forces described by Williamson (1980) and Hansen (1972) lead to divergence between metropolitan and nonmetropolitan wages and per capita incomes? Or, will the future story of the nonmetropolitan South be some combination of the above?
Highlights
For the past 25 years, members of this Association, together with a few select nonmembers, have made major contributions to the theory and measurement of regional economic growth and development and to the development and implementation of regional, state, and local economic development policy
Speculating upon the future of the region becomes a matter of anticipating the future mix of nonfarm activity, where much of that activity is determined by exogenous changes in demand, technology, and national and international events that are beyond the control of the region's decision-makers
The borderline between the notion of economic growth and economic development is not as clearly defined as one might like, the distinction is an important one, when thinking about the future of the nonmetropolitan South. It is important because historically the region has chosen an almost exclusive reliance on economic growth policies, which we might characterize as "more of the same.". Those policies have emphasized the differences between the nonmetropolitan South and the rest of the United States, including other nonmetropolitan areas in the United States, in terms of lower wages, lower taxes, less unionization, fewer environmental constraints, and federally-subsidized financing
Summary
For the past 25 years, members of this Association, together with a few select nonmembers, have made major contributions to the theory and measurement of regional economic growth and development and to the development and implementation of regional, state, and local economic development policy. The interesting question for the future is whether a continuing emphasis on regional differences with other areas of the United States will continue to be productive as a growth policy.
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