Professor A Rodríguez-Pose, STC. S407.

For students taking MSc Local Economic Development, MSc Environment and Development, MSc Regional and Urban Planning Studies, MSc Urbanisation and Development, LSE-Sciences Po Double Degree in Urban Policy, MSc Global Media and Communications, also available to other suitably qualified graduate students as permitted by the regulations for their degrees. A good background is required in one of the fields of management, economics, economic geography, regional and urban studies.

This course deals with the management and institutions of local and regional economic development. It dwells on the socio-economic implications of the emergence of local and regional governments and institutions as key actors in the design and implementation of economic development strategies across the world. In particular, the first section of the course analyses the consequences for economic efficiency and equality of the gradual but relentless shift of development responsibilities from the national and the supranational to the local and regional scale, linked of political and fiscal decentralisation, The second section of the course focuses, from a theoretical and empirical perspective, on the strategies being implemented by subnational governments across the world in order to cope and redress development problems. Strategies based on the building of infrastructure, the attraction of foreign direct investment, the support to local production and the promotion of local human resources are analysed in different institutional and governance contexts. The course draws on examples from Europe, the US, Latin America, and Asia.

20 one-hour lectures and 20 one-hour hour seminars.

R J Bennett, Decentralization, Local Governments and Markets: Towards a Post-Welfare Agenda, Clarendon Press, 1990; N Brenner, New state spaces: Urban governance and the rescaling of statehood, Oxford University Press, 2004; P Dicken, Global Shift: Mapping the Changing Contours of the World Economy, Sage, 2007; J D Donahue, Disunited States, Harper Collins, 1997; R Kanbur and A J Venables, Spatial inequality and development, Oxford University Press, 2005; A Pike, A Rodríguez-Pose and J Tomaney, Local and regional development, Routledge, 2006; R J Putnam, Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy, Princeton University Press, 1993; A J Scott, ed., Global city-regions, Oxford University Press, 2001; M Storper, The Regional World: Territorial Development in a Global Economy, Guilford Press, 1997. A number of more specialised texts will be recommended at the beginning of the course.

Two-hour unseen examination.