Local Control in an International Economy

Abstract

One of the strongest impulses behind local economic initiatives has been to increase control by ‘the locality’, however understood. In this chapter we examine the problems, limits and meanings of local control. Hopes for local control have been strongly focused on small, locally owned firms; we first examine the prospects for small firms, and then discuss what kind of control is given by small firm promotion. Part of the promise of local economic policy is to extend economic democracy by bringing economic decisions down to the local level; we argue that the effect can often be the opposite. We examine how the use of the local level causes policies to be deflected from their aims, and thus the problems of using local control to exemplify general economic strategies. We discuss the different spatial levels of economic policy — is local control sufficient to achieve the aims of local economic policy? Finally we look at the problems of coordinating local control with spatial policy within regions and the country as a whole.