IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/oup/cambje/v45y2021i3p487-510..html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Spatial Keynesian policy and the decline of regional income convergence in the USA

Author

Listed:
  • Luke Petach

Abstract

US regional development policy in the early twentieth century was characterised by a centralised, national effort to reallocate economic activity from capacity-constrained regions to those with excess capacity. In the late twentieth century, the USA gradually abandoned its policy of spatial Keynesianism in favour of a decentralised process of regional competition whereby state and local governments superseded the federal government as the loci of a policy agenda focussed on cost competitiveness. This shift was accompanied by a decline in regional income convergence in the USA. The regional competition model of development policy facilitated the decline in convergence in several ways, including: (1) the creation of coordination failures, which (A) make it difficult to implement redistributive policy within regions and (B) contribute to the existence of excess capacity in the aggregate, (2) introducing cost-related inefficiencies and (3) forgoing the opportunity to replicate previously successful spatial Keynesian policies.

Suggested Citation

  • Luke Petach, 2021. "Spatial Keynesian policy and the decline of regional income convergence in the USA," Cambridge Journal of Economics, Cambridge Political Economy Society, vol. 45(3), pages 487-510.
    • Handle: RePEc:oup:cambje:v:45:y:2021:i:3:p:487-510.
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/cje/beaa058
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Luke Petach, 2024. "Assessing the Political Aspects of Full Employment: Evidence from Strikes and Lockouts," Working Papers PKWP2407, Post Keynesian Economics Society (PKES).
    2. Johnna Montgomerie, 2023. "COVID Keynesianism: locating inequality in the Anglo-American crisis response," Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society, Cambridge Political Economy Society, vol. 16(1), pages 211-223.
    3. Kemeny, Tom & Storper, Michael, 2022. "The changing shape of spatial inequality in the United States," SocArXiv wnd8t, Center for Open Science.
    4. Luke Petach, 2022. "Great Minds in Regional Science By Peter Batey (Ed.) and David Plane (Ed.), Cham: Switzerland: Springer Nature. 2020. vii, 198 pages. $119.99 (hardcover). ISBN 978‐3‐030‐46156‐0," Growth and Change, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 53(4), December.
    5. Ciaffi, Giovanna & Deleidi, Matteo & Di Bucchianico, Stefano, 2024. "Stagnation despite ongoing innovation: Is R&D expenditure composition a missing link? An empirical analysis for the US (1948–2019)," Technological Forecasting and Social Change, Elsevier, vol. 206(C).
    6. Luke Petach & Anastasia Wilson, 2024. "The Rise of Guard Labor in the United States: Evidence from Local Labor Markets," Review of Radical Political Economics, Union for Radical Political Economics, vol. 56(2), pages 185-213, June.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:oup:cambje:v:45:y:2021:i:3:p:487-510.. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Oxford University Press (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://academic.oup.com/cje .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.