Regional Growth and Resilience: Evidence from Urban IT Centers

The ability to attract and maintain industries that grow rapidly, produce positive spillovers for other businesses, and remain relatively resilient to global and national economic fluctuations that can have especially negative effects on lessdiversified urban areas is the goal of many state and local policymakers. While the goal is clear, implementating it can be challenging, especially in a rapidly changing economic climate, where the process of selecting the right industry to link regional fortunes to can outlast the prominence of the industry itself. During the 1990s, regional policymakers began focusing efforts on building a local information technology (IT) sector. One reason for this IT focus was that, for much of the 1990s, the IT sector was among the key drivers of the national economic expansion, helping to spur robust growth in output, productivity, and income. Between 1995 and 2000, for example, IT-producing businesses accounted for nearly Regional Growth and Resilience: Evidence from Urban IT Centers*