Planning Techniques for Regional Development Policy

Among the fundamental issues for public policy consideration at this time is the question of what constitutes an appropriate or good regional distribution of economic activity. What course is the American economy taking in distributing population, industry, income, and employment between urban, suburban, and rural places and among the various geographic regions of the country? Should that direction be controlled or altered? How? This paper reports on planning tools and analyses developed to investigate those questions. The study was undertaken as part of the program planning and budgeting efforts of the Economic Development Administration, where the year 1975 was used as a planning horizon. Specifically, the paper describes the following components of the analysis: (1) alternative regional projections (to 1975) of employment and income (alternatives depended on various assumptions as to national growth); (2) alternative population projections (to 1975) for comparable regions (alternatives depended on migration assumptions); (3) comparisons of labor force availabilities, and demands for labor by region. The results of the analysis indicate, first, the importance of a national migration policy as a complement to and possibly a substitute for industrial location policies as tools for directing the regional pattern of economic growth. Second, the analysis shows that the urban centers of the country have the potential for unacceptably high unemployment rates by the year 1975.