Institutional Manifestations of Accessiblity and Urban Economic Development Polity

hile there has been an avalanche of research on the general~/B / topic of local economic development, surprisingly littlew V research has been done to account for variation in cities’ economic development policy activities. That which has been done on this subject suggests that economic need is a powerful force driving officials to adopt economic development policies ranging from loans, tax abatements, and other financial incentives to infrastructure improve-ments, zoning reform, and promotional activity. In the most notable research of this type, Rubin and Rubin (1987) find, for a sample of Illinois cities, that both indicators of a troubled local economy (such as unemployment rate and percentage in poverty) and indicators of fiscal need (such as property tax rate and per capita assessed valuation) are significant predictors of economic development policy activity. In a related vein, Bowman (1988: 523) finds, for a sample of cities in the southeast, some evidence that a city’s history of economic distress helps account for its contemporary aggressiveness in promoting economic development. Results like these suggest that, while developmental activ-ities may be in the unitary interest (Peterson 1981) of all cities, some cities must scramble to do more than others. Contrary to Peterson’s (1981: 48-49) arguments that developmental policy should be insensi-tive to both economic need and low fiscal capacity, there is an emerg-ing body of evidence showing that the magnitude of developmental policy effort is related to both forms of economic distress. As interesting and important as that line of research is, it has two important limits. First, it is typically based either on a single state sample or a unique, regional sample, leaving questions about generaliz-