The long view: New data and methods in regional economic development.

• Author: Slaper, Timothy F.

Which of the two activities are more important for economic development? Helping your neighbor move their piano, or posting a YouTube video on how to tune a piano (after it has gone out of tune after moving it)?

How would you know which is more important? What data do you need and how would you get the data?

This rather frivolous scenario concerns many of the types of questions Indiana University, together with research partners from other universities, will investigate in the coming years with a recent award from the U.S. Economic Development Administration. (1)

The Regional Economic Development (RED) project has several intersecting goals. In the main, we want to facilitate development strategies and polices that fit precisely with a region's characteristics and capacities. Every region is different. They have different histories, resources, institutions and economic linkages. The RED project will integrate several academic disciplinary domains to build models to better inform policies and strategies to promote economic growth. Part of this new model building will tap traditional data sources that have not heretofore been integrated--and, even more excitingly for data scientists, regional scientists and economic policymakers, unconventional data sources that include social media, web-scraping and mouse clicks. These new sources of data may, in the future, become the means to measure economic activity in almost real time.

Without going too far into the weeds, this article provides a high-level look at some of the RED project's aspirations by discussing its three elements:

1. Regional economic development

2. New data

3. New methods

Regional economic development

Most people have a pretty good idea about what regional economic development means. It means jobs, right? Better still, it means jobs with rising income and higher standards of living. Fair enough. But why the "regional"? Why not just economic development?

The adjective "regional" is important because everything we do occurs in space--a defined location. While we may spend a fair amount of time in a virtual world of devices and videoconferences, humans are subject to physical constraints and opportunities. While our office supplies vendor may be in Wisconsin, we Hoosiers certainly don't take our children to Wisconsin for soccer practice. There is a limit to how far we will go for routine play, shopping and work activities.

In fact, regarding that limit as to how far we will go for work--and each person has their own threshold of how far is too far--is how the federal government defines one type of region. A metropolitan statistical area (MSA) is based on commuting...