Voluntary Action for Community Economic Development: The Case of BREP in New Jersey

The Business Retention and Expansion Program (BREP) in New Jersey is a com munity-based program, sponsored jointly by the New Jersey Department of Com merce and Economic Development and the New Jersey Bell Telephone Company, that seeks to forge volunteer public/private partnerships in pursuit of local eco nomic stability and development. The purpose of this paper is to test hypotheses de rived from the literature on the well-springs of public sector action, using volun tary participation in BREP as the research context. After a brief description of the program, the paper extracts its guiding hypotheses from the discussion of "city limits" offered by Peterson (1981). Using correlation and multiple regression analyses, it discovers-as anticipated from the general theory-(1) that need is the strongest predictor of community participation in BREP and (2) that, after con trolling for need, neither community economic capacity nor the weight of local business interests plays any significant role in explaining participation. The impli cations of these empirical findings are then discussed in a brief concluding note.