Neo Classical Approach to Local Economic Development
A person I know who grew up in the mountains commented once that the trouble with prairie people is that they grew up being the largest thing on the horizon, therefore lacked a proper sense of perspective. The effect of plant closures and arrivals in a rural region have about the same sort of disproportionate effect. Their movements serve to make the rural economic scene both fragile and volatile. Fortunately there is a stabilizing effect of agriculture, even though of late that stability has been of the low variety.
Neo-classical economic theory, outlined elsewhere in contrast to the political economy outlook on economic development, tends to rely on market forces to move the economy through the development stages of history. This approach in its purist form would mean that economic development workers would do nothing and try to keep government from doing anything, so that the market could correct itself. Those with a more moderate approach would have development workers recommending government measures to curb the worst of the abuses of the free market run unchecked. Those with the most "equity" oriented approaches would have rural economic development officers working to secure mechanisms by which to better distribute blessings of the growing economy to those in the lower ranks, of which many rural area residents would qualify.
Much rural economic development does in fact operate in this perspective at the community level where incentives are offered to businesses in order to support the business side of the economy which is where the neo-classical economists see action being in the economy.
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