Decision Support Tools to Inform Regional Economic Development Analysis and Strategy

Conclusions

This chapter has referred to only a limited range of approaches being used to integrate tools of regional economic analysis into a DSS, which when linked with GIS technologies, produce a SDSS. This is indeed an exciting field for research and application. Development of the type of methods illustrated by the case studies we have provided in this chapter have the potential to help decision makers make better informed decisions regarding regional economic development and regional growth policies, and to test strategies against planning outcome criteria. It is a fast developing technological, methodological field that will increasingly enable the integration of econometric tools of regional analysis and forecasting, the measurement of economic performance and impact with both quantitative, qualitative socio-political assessment criteria, occurring at various levels spatial aggregation/disaggregation enabling those types of data to be linked with land use data and the land requirements for economic activity and housing and with transportation and other spatial infrastructure and services provision. This permits the development of SDSSs which can be used by both researchers and policy analysts and by policy makers and planning decision makers to assist the process of regional economic analysis and regional development and planning strategy formulation.