7. Designing Policies to Spur Economic Growth: How Regional Scientists Can Contribute to Future Policy Development and Evaluation

Policymakers at all levels of government try to design policies to promote economic growth. Many of these policies have a goal of attracting new businesses to an area, as new businesses are considered a key driver of local economic growth. An emerging literature suggests that such policies have heterogeneous effects on economic growth, both in terms of how the effect of the same policy may vary across locations as well as how different policies spur different types of growth. In this chapter, we discuss the insights provided by the existing literature on the effect of government policy on local economic growth. We pose questions that have not been fully answered, and for which the evidence is mixed, and discuss methodologies that future work should consider utilizing in order to answer these pressing issues. We also discuss the importance of data and the ideal types of data that should be collected and analyzed in the future. Evaluating the features and outcomes of policies will continue to be an important role for regional scientists over the next several decades, as government officials seek guidance when designing policy and allocating scarce resources.