"Can they learn anything from places like Stearns County? Its experience may offer some tips for its struggling peers: Smart industrial zoning can give an edge to local companies; higher-education institutions can serve as anchors for economic development. But its most salient advantages come from its location and industrial mix, more to do with serendipity than policy. A lot of it, Mr. Banaian told me, may have been “plain darn good luck.”...
Desegregation in the South and immigration in the West added a pool of productive workers, while investment flowed in to take advantage of their cheaper labor force and the virtual absence of unions. “Jobs were leaving Michigan, Indiana and Ohio and going to Alabama, Georgia and Tennessee,” Mr. Berube observed. In the more successful industrial counties, construction employment doubled, on average, from 1970 to 2016, as they absorbed new populations...
Can Decatur or Racine learn from Green Bay, Grand Rapids or St. Cloud? Perhaps the best example to follow would be to invest in education. Places with better-educated workers were generally the ones that managed the economic transformation of the last 50 years more successfully...
Mr. Banaian noted how St. Cloud was smart to develop industrial parks along the transportation arteries connecting it to the rest of the country. Raw money may help, too. Electrolux is decamping to South Carolina from St. Cloud thanks, in part, to a tax incentive worth $73 million over 32 years, according to a state estimate cited by the company. Research by Enrico Moretti of the University of California, Berkeley, and Michael Greenstone of the University of Chicago suggests that for all policymakers’ gripes about government subsidies to corporate investment, they can yield a high return to the local economy."
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