The U.S. Place-Based Policy Supply Chain

Place-based policy in the United States comprises a wide range of government programs that are spread across federal, state, and local agencies and that rely on public, private, and nonprofit organizations for policy design and implementation. We document how loosely connected vertical policy supply chains distribute resources from federal and state governments to recipients at the local level. The apparatus is the product of 150 years of policy innovation, both from the top down, with the federal government periodically launching major initiatives whose place-based impacts tend to be long-lived (even if the specific policies are not), and from the bottom up, with state and local actors engineering their own policy solutions, many of which have endured and now constitute modern policy practice. That practice includes not just tax incentives for business investment, the subject of most economic research on place-based policy, but support for community redevelopment, workforce development, small business promotion, technological innovation, and regional planning and strategy. Intermediary organizations that connect government agencies to local recipients are central to resource delivery. Because they tend to be created, funded, and (or) run by non-state actors, there appears to be wide geographic variation in organizational capacity for place-based policy. Understanding the causes and consequences of that variation is needed for a full accounting of how place-based policy works in the U.S.