Economic Development Quarterly

This article makes the case for more rigorous evaluations of state and local economic development programs, and provides some suggestions on how more rigorous evaluations may be accomplished.

A community accounting matrix (CAM) is an economic model that summarizes the transactions between the various industries and types of household in a neighborhood, as well as the neighborhood's links with its adjoining city and region. This article describes the construction and findings of a prototype CAM for the mainly African-American-populated East Side neighborhood of Buffalo and the more affluent, mainly white-populated city and suburbs. The CAM thus quantifies key structural relationships between race, space, and class in the Buffalo area. The CAM is used to calculate the implications of changes in this structure, such as continued shifts from manufacturing to services in the metropolitan area. It may also be used to evaluate neighborhood development projects and strategies that are designed to reverse the East Side's historic decline. The article begins with a summary of the demographic and economic history of Buffalo and the East Side and summarizes an analysis by Taylor of the need for a territorially focused community development strategy for the East Side. In the light of this analysis, several requirements for the CAM are discussed. The construction of CAM is then described, using a variety of data and a cultural accounting methodology developed elsewhere. Calculations are presented that demonstrate the “multiplier” and income distribution processes at work in the East Side's economy. Last, some possible applications of the CAM are discussed, and the empirical structure of the CAM and preliminary findings are related to other theories of poverty and the inner city.

A benefit-cost study of New York State's Centers for Advanced Technology (CAT) program was undertaken to (1) respond to increasing legislative and executive demands for quantitative assessments of these programs; (2) demonstrate the feasibility, within identified limits, of evaluating the economic impacts of state technology programs; and (3) use the empirical findings to highlight important but largely ignored economic and political issues related to distributive criteria and differences in the distribution of benefits between producers and consumers. Estimated total state benefits related to increases in private- and public-sector research grants, technological innovation and increased productivity, increased or retained employment, and improved quality of the technical workforce ranged between $190 million and $360 million, or between three and six times New York's direct investment in the CAT program.

Little information exists about the effects of economic restructuring on American women. Effects on men and women likely differ because women have the major responsibility for household work and because men and women are segregated by occupation. Women lose jobs less often than men, but are unemployed longer, less likely to find new work in manufacturing, and much more likely to leave the labor force. Women account for the majority of the increase in multiple jobholders. Geographically isolated female workers affect the location, growth, or reorganization of work—in low-wage manufacturing and office functions, for instance. Much remains unknown about the differential effects on men and women of the increase in temporary work and multiple jobholding, for instance, and the nature of economic restructuring stimulated by poor female minority populations in inner cities. Conventional economic development programs are poorly adapted to solving the problems women face during economic restructuring.

This article examines industrial homeworking, a particular form of restructured production, in two rural, midwestern communities that incorporated these jobs as part of an economic development strategy. Case studies of these communities provide the data to discuss the process of development and the conditions of homeworking. Homework, as development, incorporated the gendered division of labor in the home into market relations and promoted uneven development between urban and rural areas. These cases point to the need to reconceptualize development, especially in rural communities.

Emphasis on the problems of the “underclass” has diverted attention from the problem of low-wage poverty. Yet low-wage poverty is becoming more prevalent in cities such as Los Angeles. The downgraded manufacturing and service-sector jobs emerging there are increasingly filled by women. This article relies on fieldwork among immigrant domestic workers to argue that popular theoretical explanations of low-wage poverty are inadequate in the case of women, relying on simplistic assumptions about women's roles at home and the organization of their households. They result in policies meant to force households and women to conform to these outmoded assumptions. Through field research, the author documents the diversity of household forms in one community of women workers. Within households, differing domestic burdens for women are identified and related to the composition of each household and to relationships among household members. These burdens, in turn, are linked to women's ability to work consistently. Finally, the author advocates increased support for those community organizations best able to develop appropriate services for poor working women and recommends a program of systematic evaluation of the largely undocumented universe of current programs.

Rural women's labor-force participation rates have increased rapidly over the past decade and a half, simultaneous with economic restructuring in both metropolitan and nonmetropolitan areas. This article examines women's labor-force participation and returns to employment within four nonmetropolitan counties in eastern Iowa, contiguous with three metropolitan areas. The job structures and job rewards of women employed in four industry groups in metropolitan and nonmetropolitan job locations are compared in the context of the constraints posed by commuting costs. Also examined are findings about the nature and extent of nonmetropolitan women's labor-force participation in the context of the employment restructuring trends in the metropolitan and nonmetropolitan portions of the study area.

This article analyzes the effects of increasing economic integration between Mexico and the United States on workers in the California and Baja California fresh fruit and vegetable industry. This sector has experienced significant economic integration in labor, capital, and product markets over the past 10 years. During this period, wages in this sector have fallen on both sides of the border, and wages in Mexico are currently about one-sixth of California wages. Although workers in Baja and California perform the same tasks using the same technology and work for firms funded by some of the same U.S. capital, indigenous Mixtec women and children from the poor, southern state of Oaxaca are concentrated in the lower-paying jobs in Baja, whereas Mixtec and mestizo men have greater access to the higher-paying jobs in California. Differing labor processes on opposite sides of the border result in this binational gender and ethnic segmentation of the labor market, which will slow wage convergence even if remaining trade barriers are removed. Better enforcement of laws and broader employment generation strategies are necessary to reduce poverty among farm workers on both sides of the border.

In the context of theories of gender and skill, this article provides an analysis of the way new efforts to restructure domestic apparel production are affecting women production workers. The theoretical framework embodies the notion that skill has traditionally been defined by the work that men do. Women's socially and culturally devalued position has relegated them to labor-intensive, low-wage work, traditionally seen as unskilled. The emergence of new forms of international trade, changing U.S. policies, and transformations in America's financial and retail markets have contributed to new forms of labor intensity for women apparel operators. Evidence from a study of the men's tailored clothing industry and other firms producing comparable garments leads to the conclusion that efforts to restructure domestic apparel production through flexible manufacturing tend to create new forms of taylorist production in certain segments of the industry. Rather than improving the quality of work for women apparel operators, flexible manufacturing tends to intensify the labor of these workers and may have the potential to contribute to their experience of declining wages.

Hoppes recently proposed a reformulation of the classic shift-share model for disaggregated use by local practitioners. His arguments ignore demand-pull considerations, and his alternative model implies that policymakers can dramatically alter the sectoral composition of the local economy in the medium term.

Shift-share analysis results with either the conventional model or the DEM model are identical at the regional level. At the industrial level, however, the two models are quite different. In the author's original article, he indicated that he believed the DEM model to be superior to the conventional model at the industrial level in its analytical, interpretive, and policy qualities. DEM's homothetic approach as well as its reallocation of the growth and mix effects are more didactic than conventional model results. Neither shift-share model is a growth model nor designed for analyzing demand-pull or foreign competition factors.

This essay reviews recent evaluations of three of the most widely used state and local economic development strategies—traditional business recruitment, enterprise zones, and high-technology development. The studies do not succeed in their efforts to produce broadly generalizable findings that provide clear guidance to state and local policymakers and practitioners. Rather, they show that local conditions are responsible for the success or failure and level of net community benefits to be derived from any approach. Under the right conditions, each of the approaches described here might be appropriate.