Categories of Local Economic Development: An Empirical Analysis

In examining local economic development incentives, scholars have found it useful to employ typologies of development practices. Such typologies have been based on assumptions that techniques reflect functional categories, such as marketing and financial incentives, or can be organized by the nature of costs and benefits, or by the nature of incentive goals. While useful heuristic devices, little effort has been made to test these typologies empirically. This research note provides an empirically based typology of local economic development incentives, using data from 967 cities collected by the International City Management Association.