11.407-408 Economic Development Tools and Techniques:

Instructors

Prof. Amy Glasmeier (, 9-525)

Teaching Assistant:

Course Details

Meeting Times: T TH 9:30-11:00

Classrooms:

Units: 12

Course Website:

Summary and Learning Objectives

Every economic development planning process starts with three elements: a project idea, a baseline analysis, and some idea of a positive future scenario. Baseline studies are the bread and butter of any planning activity. Prior to proposing solutions, planners need to understand their communities of interest inside and out, and they must be able to identify the forces for change. Planning for economic development also requires substantive theories that explain how the economy works.

Whether you are a land use planner, an urban designer, a community planner, or a transportation consultant, baseline studies are the foundation for understanding the context of a community. This class presents basic tools and is designed to teach anyone in any sector of planning to use these tools effectively.

The course entails two streams of knowledge that together form an innovative curriculum, which allows us to get to the essence of the course content quickly: to teach you how to analyze the current situation, to interpret the analysis, and to make projections based on your empirical results. For the first two thirds of the course you will learn basic economic development theories, sources of data and how to access them, tools of data analysis, and techniques of interpretation. In the last third, you will then apply the theories, tools, and techniques to develop a baseline study of a community.

In this course, you will learn the basic tools practitioners use in economic development policy and planning:

  • How to collect data for and analyze local economic indicators (both current and historical)
  • How to do a shift-share analysis (a measure of a) the components of a local economy; b) changes in the economic base over time)
  • How to calculate a location quotient (a measure of relative concentration of aspects of a community’s economic base)
  • How to do a population projection to accurately understand the demographic profile of a community and plan for economic development
  • How to calculate a living wage for a specific area and identify jobs that pay living wages
  • How to evaluate the assets of a specific location

In this workshop we go beyond conventional practice by introducing a new tool and framework to characterize the conditions of a community. Halfway through the course we will introduce the measurement of community assets. Assets represent the qualities of the underlying components of an economy that reflect value, definition and distinction to an economy. While conventional economic development theory touches on the conception of “assets,” their measurement and explicit utilization are still relatively uncommon in economic development practice. Assets are attributes of local resources that enable a community to change over time. Combining assets with our conventional picture of a local economy offers us a new dimension of activity that can be acted upon to bring about economic change.

Course Structure

The course combines short lectures, lab work, and discussion. Students will prepare for class each week by reviewing readings and other materials ahead of time. Class on Mondays will begin with a short presentation on the economic development theory behind the tools and techniques we will discuss that week. After the presentation, students will jump in and learn about basic concepts and techniques by hands-on use of web-based and spreadsheet tools designed for their use as professionals. Students will use the tools and techniques to investigate a place of interest throughout the course. The last hour of class will be used to share results and discuss how to interpret findings.

Assignments

Performance in the class will be based on short papers students produce as they learn the tools and techniques. Students will select a location as their study area. We recommend that students select a place they know well, like their hometown county. This will allow them to use their intuition and past experience to help in interpreting the results of their investigation.

Although many of the general concepts can be used in international contexts, for practical reasons we will be focusing on the U.S. in the class (Although students may be able to use international data for the analyses if it is available). As students work through the tools, they will compute measures evaluating local conditions. We will discuss the results and then students will write short memos summarizing their findings. We will provide guiding questions to stimulate students’ thinking about the purposes behind the tools and the tools in context with other tools. Taken together, the course will yield an economic base assessment, demographic analysis, population projection, living wage analysis, and local asset evaluation for the students’ chosen location.

These assignments will then be used to prepare a final report, an economic and demographic baseline study of the communities students have chosen. Students will have several weeks when class will not meet that they can use to complete this professional-quality report.

The due dates are as follows (please upload assignments to Stellar):

  • Memo 1: Economic Base Assessment (Tuesday, 9/23)
  • Memo 2: Demographic Analysis (Tuesday, 9/30)
  • Memo 3: Population Projection (Tuesday, 10/7)
  • Memo 4: Living Wage Analysis (Friday, 10/25)
  • Memo 5: Local Asset Assessment (Friday, 11/8)
  • Guest speaker
  • Guest speaker
  • Guest speaker
  • Presentation of Final Report contents (Monday, 11/25)
  • Final Report (Monday, 12/9)

In general, the memos will contain no more than two pages of single-spaced text, plus supporting charts, tables, and graphs. Their purpose is to demonstrate mastery of the techniques, illustrate comprehension of the underlying concepts associated with the tools, and explain limitations of and questions raised by the analysis exercise.