Picking Winners

Intended for local and federal economic development planners, the report is a composite and summary of a series of technical documents prepared by RAND for HUD on the causes and consequences of industrial specialization in local economies. It uses previous findings to build a methodology for selecting promising industrial targets — e.g., business services, corporate headquarters, tourism, durable and nondurable manufacturing — for individual metropolitan areas. Large new databases and computer modeling techniques make it possible to tailor industrial development strategies to local characteristics. One section details an approach for selecting the industries most likely to "take" in a particular economy, while a second section shows how to assess the ramifications of a given industrial strategy for total employment, central city fiscal and economic health, opportunities for disadvantaged workers, and local vulnerability to national business cycles.