Reining in the Competition for Capital

This book explores the causes, character, and potential remedies for the growing spatial competition for capital. Its diverse group of contributors present a broad set of workable reforms including: regulation of site consultants; mandated transparency in negotiations, bids, and deals; better structured deals; performance requirements and clawbacks for subsidized firms; and adoption of united economic development budgets.https://research.upjohn.org/up_press/1166/thumbnail.jp

GOVE225 7/22/2003 8:57 PM Page 471 The Case Against Privatizing National Security

Since the mid-1990s, the U.S. Pentagon has accelerated efforts to outsource weapons, battlefield and base support operations, and troop training, invoking competition-based savings and better quality. I review the arguments for and against such privatization and summarize recent Pentagon outsourcing experience. I conclude that the current enthusiasm for privatization is driven largely by commercial concerns and lobbying rather than real gains to the nation and citizens, that it poses dangers of monopolization and undue political influence, and that current contracting practices lack verification and mandatory evaluation safeguards to deliver promised results. Privatization and outsourcing as public-policy initiatives have spread rapidly in the 1990s, locally, nationally, and globally. Although it has been little studied for this purpose, national defense constitutes a remarkable and long-lived precedent for such arrangements. Contracting out in the military sector offers an opportunity to study efficiency outcomes and th

Metropolitan High-Technology Industry Growth in the Mid 1970s: Can Everyone Have a Slice of the High-Tech Pie

The enthusiasm surrounding high-technology (high-tech) indus­ tries is in part a response to the prospect of future employment growth and to the expectation that these industries will form the basis of self-sustaining local/regional economies. Currently, how­ ever, states and communities compete for high-tech employment with only a vague understanding of the forces governing the diffusion of high-tech development. All too often they use scarce public revenues to attract these industries with little assurance of long-run returns on such investment