Book Review: Economic Development for Everyone: Creating Jobs,Growing Businesses,and Building Resilience in Low-Income Communities

Mark Miller’s book, Economic Development for Everyone, is the best economic development book in decades. In it, Miller approaches the impossible goal of writing a book with academic rigor, yet with practical application, that reaches a diverse audience of academics, students, economic development practitioners, and community leaders. The book is focused on “ED practice, rather than more basic research or theory-building” (p. 5), yet the depth and breadth of the literature covered is astounding. Miller is able to cover such a vast array of literature, albeit bounded per his own acknowledgement, through the use of a systematic literature review. Miller follows the systematic literature review standards suggested by Jesson, Matheson, and Lacey (2011). Systematic literature reviews provide means of collecting, analyzing, and synthesizing academic research to address a research question. Miller focuses primarily on four academic journals for this review: Economic Development Quarterly, Journal of the American Planning Association, Community Development: Journal of the Community Development Society, and Review of Planning Literature. He acknowledges that this analysis led to a snowball sample and inclusion of literature from other related journals.

The use of a systematic literature review technique demonstrates a solid methodological foundation for uncovering, categorizing, and assessing the effectiveness of multiple economic development approaches. Systematic literature reviews have been common across a variety of areas related to economic development, such as networking and innovation (Pittaway, Robertson, Munir, Denyer, & Neely, 2004), entrepreneurship education (Pittaway & Cope, 2007), and academic engagement and commercialization (Perkmann et al., 2013), among others. Yet Miller (at least to this author’s knowledge) is the first to apply a systematic literature review to the core economic development literature. Five themes or approaches emerged from this systematic review:

These five approaches are outlined in detail in chapters 4 to 8, respectively. As an introduction to these five themes, Miller spends the introduction and first three chapters addressing the foundations of economic development and low-income communities. Chapter 1 addresses the question of “who cares?” and outlines the challenges facing low-income communities. Miller uses the term low-income over other alternatives, such as poor, poverty, or impoverished. He notes that, while these terms are often used and may have specific meanings, they may be viewed as limiting or negatively by low-income communities. In this chapter, he further stresses “the most inclusive term would be ‘economic development for everyone’” (p. 13).

Chapter 1 is data rich and discusses the disparities found in low-income communities, such as homeownership rates, employment opportunities, educational attainment rates, tax base, incarceration, broadband access, and food deserts. Specifically, he outlines geographic patterns of low-income communities with subsections focusing on rural, urban, and suburban poverty. He builds on this with a discussion of the special challenges facing low-income populations.

People versus place-based economic development is addressed in chapter 2. After reviewing the literature, Miller stresses that many individuals are place-bound, and low-income individuals, in particular, are less mobile. Chapter 3 examines the role of mainstream economic development in contributing to low-income communities. It provides a comprehensive overview of historical practices and the role of the public and private sectors in addressing economic development needs in low-income communities. The chapter covers the first wave (industrial attraction) through the fourth wave (sustainable economic development) of economic development.

Chapters 4 to 8 provide the most valuable material to practitioners and to students seeking a better understanding of various and competing economic development practices. These chapters also represent themes from the systematic literature review. Chapter 4 focuses on the role of education from pre-K to higher education. Miller highlights the role of education in the rise of South Korea, for example, and the correlation between educational attainment (and educational access) and economic performance. The literature on the impact of educational attainment and access at each level, including technical training, is reviewed. Chapter 5 focuses on asset-based development and how communities can build on their existing capacity. This chapter includes a review of the social capital and participatory research literature. Asset-based economic development includes the practice of utilizing overlooked resources such as local history, local amenities, faith-based organizations, and the inclusion of immigrants as assets.

Chapter 6 emphasizes the role of entrepreneurship in economic development. Topics include community development corporations, incubators, and cooperatives. Special attention is given to the financing tools to address and support entrepreneurship in low-income communities, such as the Community Reinvestment Act, tax increment financing districts, microenterprises, and the role of predatory lending in low-income communities. Chapter 7 focuses on diversification as an approach to economic development with a focus on tourism and its impact on low-income residents and low-income populations. Miller discusses efforts made in the tourism industry to be more beneficial to low-income workers/communities. Chapter 8 concludes the book with an acknowledgment that economic development has entered the fourth wave or phase: sustainable economic development. Here he targets the need for economic development to consider the natural environment and, increasingly, social equity. These strategies include energy and conservation and redevelopment (downtowns, historic preservation, and brownfields). The social equity angle targets wealth creation and paying a living wage to workers.

While Miller’s book is excellent, there are some areas for improvement. First, the layout of the book could be improved. It lacks charts and graphs, and it only contains two figures. The addition of charts and graphs could highlight many of Miller’s points in the first three chapters on income inequality and changes to and among low-income communities and populations. The book does contain boxes and sidebars, which are helpful but seem awkwardly designed and placed in a paperback book. As a reader, I found them distracting and wished they were placed as appendices or the book was designed differently to better accommodate their inclusion.

Second, the first three chapters on describing low-income communities are rich but also very dense for a practitioner or student. A practitioner, especially one living and/or working in a low-income community, reading the book might do well to skip directly to the five dimensions or approaches. Likewise, an instructor may wish to assign the first three chapters as optional reading in an economic development course and skip to the rich content starting in chapter 4.

Third, it is difficult to write a book that satisfies all readers. Miller’s systematic review of the literature is a major contribution to economic development as an academic field. Academic readers would benefit from an appendix where Miller detailed the systematic review approach he utilized. Hopefully, he can make that a separate submission to Economic Development Quarterly or another quality journal for the benefit of the field.

Finally, I felt the book needed a conclusion. It ended with the last chapter on sustainable economic development. A short recap of the five approaches would benefit the reader and the reposition of each of these relative to the other. Implementing some of these suggestions would benefit future editions of the book.

Practitioners of economic development, even those not primarily working with low-income communities, should read this book. The goal of economic development should be to create opportunities for everyone, and Miller gives an excellent review of the effectiveness of those approaches. Economic development as an academic field owes him a debt of gratitude. We now have a single source that captures the best approaches and research across the field.