We are happy to share with you the initial collection of papers for Reaching Regions.

Reaching Regions was conceived as a forum for helping translate the important research conducted by regional scientists for a public audience. Reaching Regions is an open access, peer-reviewed, outreach journal for social science research relevant to North American regions.

The inaugural collection includes the four papers presented below.

We are grateful to the authors, reviewers, editorial staff, publishers, and NARSC officers for helping make this happen.

Additional information including submission instructions is available via the journal’s website https://www.iastatedigitalpress.com/rreg/

We hope many of you will sign up for an account on the website to get notifications of upcoming article releases.

Heather Stephens and John Winters

Editors

Reaching Regions

Mapping production activity in Yukon: Experimental estimates of grid square-based Gross Domestic Product. Robby Bemrose (Health Canada),
Mark Brown  (Economic Analysis Division, Statistics Canada),
Ryan Macdonald (Economic Analysis Division, Statistics Canada)

In recognition that more geographically granular economic data improves our ability to understand the nature of production, support regional economies, and address emerging socio-economic and environmental problems, statistical agencies are increasingly asked to produce gross domestic product (GDP) estimates at finer levels of geography. This demand is being met in different ways around the world, with, for instance, the European Union producing GDP estimates at the Nomenclature of Territorial Units for Statistics level and the United States producing GDP estimates at the county level. While Canada produces GDP estimates for census metropolitan areas, it does not currently produce the same level of coverage for smaller geographies as does the European Union or the United States. This paper addresses this gap by developing subprovincial and subterritorial grid square-based GDP using the Yukon as a test case. The Yukon was chosen because its small resource- and government-based economy provides a challenging but comprehendible test of these fine-grained measures. This choice will also support ongoing work measuring the economies of circumpolar regions. With this in mind, the paper has three objectives. First, it introduces and discusses the benefits a fixed grid for measurement. Second, it identifies the types of data necessary to estimate GDP across a 1 km2 grid. Lastly, it produces a set of grid-based GDP estimates that serve to describe the geography of economic output in Yukon.

https://doi.org/10.31274/rreg.18381

Novel innovation measures for regional development: A review of digital-only approaches. Courtney Bower (City and Regional Planning, Cornell University)

Traditional measures of regional innovation draw on social, economic, and technological data to construct indexes relevant to policymakers. While useful, such measures contain important drawbacks, such as time lags and high costs. A recent report by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) on the development of sub-national indicators of innovation highlights alternative methods to measure regional innovation. These digital-only measures utilize open-access, web-based data sources and can be used to inform and support policy via studies and the construction of indexes. Such approaches can augment traditional measures, potentially addressing some of the drawbacks.

https://doi.org/10.31274/rreg.18341

Why have local economic development policies been so disappointing, and where do we go from here? Michael J. Hicks  (Center for Business and Economic Research, Ball State University), Amanda Weinstein (Research, Center on Rural Innovation), Emily Wornell (Center for Local and State Policy, Ball State University) 

State and local efforts to attract 'footloose' firms to their regions, through tax incentives or direct subsidies have largely proven ineffective in boosting population or employment.  Despite an extensive history of poor results, these  economic development policies remain a common fixture at the state and local level. Here we explain why these policies have proven ineffective and why the prospects for future success of business attraction policies ae almost non-existent. We then outline why continuation of traditional business attraction policies may divert public resources away from policies demonstrated to improve quality of life of existing residents. We then show that improvements in quality of life boost population and employment, and explain how a strong suite of quality of life policies will actually boost population and employment.   We recommend approaches towards redirecting state and local economic development policy towards quality of life programs, and away from disappointing business attraction policies that are currently the staple of local economic development.    

https://doi.org/10.31274/rreg.18245

The long-standing push to eliminate state personal income taxes in Oklahoma: Is there an economic growth case to be made? Dan S. Rickman (Department of Economics, Oklahoma State University), Hongbo Wang (Economics, Oklahoma State University)

Using Oklahoma as a case study, this paper evaluates the claims that lower state and local taxes on personal income increase economic growth. We first demonstrate the fallacy of using simple cross-state comparisons of high- and low-income tax states to evaluate the claims. This motivates a brief review of our recently published academic articles on state and local fiscal policy, which suggest that higher state personal income taxes either have no effect on economic growth or in some cases increase growth. Based on insights from our published papers, we then analyze the most recent tax cuts implemented by Oklahoma in 2022 and fail to find any evidence that the tax cuts increased income and tax revenues.

https://doi.org/10.31274/rreg.18270