Metropolitan Business Plans: A New Approach to Economic Growth

Prepared in partnership with the Brookings Institution’s Metropolitan Policy Program for “Global Metro Summit 2010: Delivering the Next Economy,” this policy brief formally introduces the concept of metropolitan business planning, and describes three pilot projects, in Northeast Ohio, Minneapolis-Saint Paul and the Puget Sound (Seattle) region. Offering a new “metro-economic” policy to complement national macroeconomic policy with a new “metro-economic” policy, the paper lays out the characteristics and drivers of regional economies, how they lend themselves to the discipline of business planning, and the implications for regional economic growth policy as well as a “new federalism.”