Economic Development

New evidence on lending disparities and the policy tools that can expand entrepreneurship in underserved communities.

How the normalization of distributed work is redistributing economic activity away from coastal hubs into smaller metros and rural counties.

The distributional effects of federal clean energy investment, and what happened when the policy framework faced a change in political administration.

Whether CHIPS Act investment is producing resilient regional manufacturing ecosystems or a new generation of single-facility company towns.

U.S. corporate training expenditures reached $102.8 billion in 2025 — yet average training hours per employee fell from 47 to 40 hours in the same year. American employers are spending more on training in aggregate while investing less in any given worker. This article examines the accounting asymmetry, market failure, and policy gaps that explain why the United States chronically underinvests in human capital relative to its global competitors.

When South Carolina competes for a major manufacturing facility, the state's pitch begins not with tax incentives but with a workforce guarantee. That promise is delivered through readySC — a program that sits inside the Department of Commerce, not Labor. South Carolina figured out what most states have not: workforce development and economic development are not parallel programs. They are the same program. The administrative separation between them is costing regional economies in measurable ways.