Since its inception after World War II, the practice of local and regional economic development has been largely divorced from national economic development policies, writes Rob Atkinson in a chapter of the edited volume The Oxford Handbook of Local Competitiveness. This is in part because the former was focused on addressing regional problems in what was assumed to be a healthy national economy. But as the U.S. economy has suffered from serious structural decline, this relationship can no longer be taken as a given. In this climate, it is time to more effectively link national and local economic development efforts if both are to be successful.
