Transatlantic lessons from Bidenomics place-based policies: opportunities and limits for addressing regional inequality

Both the UK and the US demonstrate social-economic spatial inequalities which are increasingly difficult for politicians to ignore. In the US, ‘Bidenomics’ policies pursued a geographically and socially-inclusive green-and-secure growth agenda, reflecting a resurgence of place-based policies worth learning from even beyond the Biden administration. Motivated by a transitioning government in the UK and a resurgent interest in place-based policy globally, this commentary facilitates international policy learning by profiling three generative lessons and two critiques of Bidenomics place-based policies as regional inequality interventions. We profile specific policy examples to enable international policymakers to adapt place-based policies in the Bidenomics model, and hopefully, build policy which more effectively responds to economic and political distress in deprived regions. By incorporating place-based policy into industrial strategy, we argue that Bidenomics shows promise for redistributing the geography of innovation toward heartland cities. However, to truly reconcile regional inequality future, place-based policy developments in the US and abroad must go farther to address deep deprivation across the full heterogeneity of ‘left behind’ places. We conclude with a discussion of how future place-based policy developments in the US and UK might address economic and political maladies associated with regional inequality.