The Local Economy Solution: How Innovative, Self-Financing "Pollinator" Enterprises Can Grow Jobs and Prosperity - Softcover

Michael Shuman

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1603585753 ISBN 13: 9781603585750

Publisher: Chelsea Green Publishing Company, 2015

Synopsis

In cities and towns across the USA, economic development is at a crossroads. A growing body of evidence has proven that its current cornerstone incentives to attract and retain large, globally mobile businesses is a dead end. Even those programMEs that focus on local business, through buy-local initiatives, for example, depend on ongoing support from government or philanthropy. The entire practice of economic development has become ineffective and unaffordable and is in need of a makeover. The Self-Financed Community suggests an alternative approach in which states and cities nurture a new generation of special kinds of businesses that help local businesses grow. These cutting-edge companies, which Shuman calls pollinator businesses, are creating jobs and the conditions for future economic growth, and doing so in self-financing ways. Pollinator businesses are especially important to communities that are struggling to lift themselves up in a period of economic austerity, when municipal budgets are being slashed. They also promote locally owned businesses that increase local self-reliance and evince high labour and environmental standards.

About this title

About the Author

Michael H. Shuman is an economist, attorney, author, and entrepreneur, and a globally recognized expert on community economics. He is one of the architects of the crowdfunding JOBS Act signed into law by President Obama in April 2012. He s a fellow at Cutting Edge Capital and Post-Carbon Institute, and a founding board member of the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies (BALLE). He teaches economic development at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver. He has authored or coauthored nine books, including Local Dollars, Local Sense, The Small Mart Revolution, and Going Local. Shuman has performed leakage analyses and related economic-development planning in more than ten states, and has analyzed opportunities for food localization for several states, cities, counties, and regions across the nation. He has given an average of more than one invited talk per week, mostly to local governments and universities, for 30 years in 47 states and eight countries. He has appeared on numerous television and radio shows, such as the Lehrer News Hour and NPR's "Talk of the Nation," and NPR s All Things Considered and has written nearly one hundred articles for such periodicals as New York Times, Washington Post, Nation, Weekly Standard, Foreign Policy, Parade, and The Chronicle on Philanthropy. Previously, he has been a W.K. Kellogg National Leadership Fellow. He is also a member of both the State Bar of California and the District of Columbia Bar, and he lives in Silver Spring, Maryland with his two children.

Edition details

• Publisher: Chelsea Green Publishing Company
• Publication date: 2015
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1603585753
• ISBN 13: 9781603585750
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 216