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The article presents the author's views on a paper by Stephen A. Hoenack which discusses how pressure groups with common interests have positive or negative effects on economic progress. The precise relation between pressure group activity and economic development needs further explanation. The article has a positive perception of world economic growth. The positive support for growth by pressure groups have an impact on actual economic development. The paper fails to provide a valid proof that growth-inducing coalitions must become increasing powerful.

Objective. Local governments in the United States have adopted a wide variety of policies to stimulate their local economies, but there is still debate over the effectiveness of such efforts. This paper examines the relationship between local development policies and changes in the number of jobs in both the manufacturing and service sectors during the mid-1980s. Methods. Data cover almost 900 cities and are based on Census Bureau sources and a 1984 International City Management Association survey of local governments. A two-stage least squares regression analysis is used. Results. The findings indicate that policy adoption had a limited effect on employment change from 1982 to 1987. For both manufacturing and service employment, market factors had the strongest effect on employment growth. Conclusions. The findings suggest that local economic development policies had a limited influence on changes in the number of jobs in cities during the economic recovery of the 1980s. Local investment in infrastructure and education, however, may enhance employment growth in both the manufacturing and service sectors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the impact of state industrial policy using new data on Gross State Product and a new measure of state Industrial Policy Activism. The first section of the paper discusses the measure of industrial policy activism. The second section describes the development and testing of an impact model for two measures of economic distress for the 1982 to 1986 period. Finally, some conclusions are drawn about the complicated early impact of state industrial policy. Two indicators of economic distress are considered. The first is general economic growth as measured by the growth rate of gross state product from 1977 to 1982. When the state IPA scores were regressed on GSP growth rate, GSP generated a highly significant negative coefficient, indicating that those states which grew the least from 1977 to 1982 were more likely to have adopted the policies tapped by the IPA measure. The second measure of distress is growth in the manufacturing sector as measured by the growth rate of gross state product from manufacturing from 1977 to 1982. When the state IPA scores were regressed on GSP-M growth rate, GSP-M also generated a highly significant negative coefficient, again indicating that those states which grew the least in terms of manufacturing GSP from 1977 to 1982 were more likely to have adopted the IPA policies.

In recent years the American states have begun to adopt new types of economic development policies, variously called "demand side" policies, industrial policy, or interventionist policy. In this paper the authors discuss the emergence of these policies and the political and economic changes in states which led to their consideration. Two explanations for their adoption are developed--the business capture hypothesis and the meso-corporatist hypothesis. These differing interpretations are tested with data on state interest groups, government capacity, and economic stress. Data on policy adoptions by 1986 show that the meso-corporatist model provides a better account of industrial policy than does the business capture hypothesis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many groups of individuals with common interests have positive or negative effects on economic progress through their actions within firms or via their influence on governmental policies. This paper suggests that the growth-inducing coalitions will prevail in an environment where firms compete on the basis of innovations and political entities compete for mobile resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper tests "growth machine" propositions about the attitudes toward growth of different local elite groups. The findings support "growth machine" conceptions in part--there is wide elite approbation of growth--but further analysis reveals that different elite groups have different conceptions of growth and of the role of the public and private sector in controlling it. Most notably, the local political elite sees growth as a privately driven phenomenon, and this perception among local political leaders is associated with a tendency to denigrate local government's power to respond to policy problems aggravated by growth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper notes that indicators of intermetropolitan migration and the rise of the sunbelt were evident in the U.S. as early as 1940. The demographic and economic trends that are part and parcel of the phenomenon euphemistically termed the rise of the sunbelt and the decline of the Northeast have recently become a dominant domestic policy concern. Unfortunately, this sudden emphasis on the issue of interregional growth and decline and the lavish praise bestowed upon the supposedly trouble-free sunbelt are both surprising and unwarranted for several reasons. First, the patterns of disparate population and economic growth were evident as far back as the 1940s and thus are not indicative of a new phenomenon. In addition, the sunbelt is hardly the crisis-free region it is portrayed as by its most ardent supporters. In order to place the rise of the sunbelt in a perspective that is unencumbered by the false mystique that now engulfs the region, two facets of this phenomenon are examined: first, the historical patterns and components of the population flows that have contributed to the recent trends of divergent metropolitan development; and, second, some of the potential problems and fundamental contradictions inherent in both the continuation and cessation of this massive population influx.

This paper documents the limited success of Western agricultural methods and falling world foodstuff reserves as of September 1976. The author suggests that developing areas in the future must rely on traditional agriculture to feed their burgeoning populations. The past decade or two has witnessed refreshing return to concern with indigenous agricultural systems, the methods by which they function, the problems they face, the role they play in economic development, and possible ways to work within the confines of those systems to upgrade rather than replace them with questionably applicable Western technology. Our knowledge of those systems is rudimentary at best, yet those systems must bear the burden of providing essential foodstuffs for peoples of the developing areas over the immediate and near future. Serious mistakes in plans and programs have resulted from insufficient understanding of traditional agriculture and have led directly to disasters, and further tampering invites additional, and perhaps serious, problems beyond those we already face in a shrinking world. The author notes that despite considerable colonial effort and more recent effort on the part of independent countries, no superior agricultural systems have been developed that are applicable in tropical developing areas.

The article presents the author's response to questions raised by Eirik G. Furubotn about his paper, Group Behavior and Economic Growth, which focuses on the impact of pressure group behavior on economic development. In response to the first issue raised by Furubotn, the author explained the multiple constraints on economic growth and the impact of institutional constraints on economic growth. The assertion of Furubotn that the paper gives inadequate attention to alternative explanations is not accurate. The past rate of progresss in building existing models of political behavior does not mean that useful formal models will be available in the near future.