Examining the role of the public sector in small-business debt-capital formation, this book describes current approaches, conceptually and pragmatically, and evaluates their advantages and disadvantages from a variety of perspectives. It also suggests a model for improving our approach to small business capital formation in the United States. Financing small business creation and expansion has always been difficult. Private debt capital providers tend to avoid small business because the latter are preceived to be too risky. Yet because of the importance of small businesses to national economic growth, stability, and innovation, ensuring that these businesses can obtain and effectively use appropriate levels of debt capital is vital to national well-being. How, and to what extent, should the public sector intervene in the debt capital markets to ensure that sufficient capital flows to small businesses? This book is an attempt to answer that question.

Recent years have witnessed a revolution in the way economies work. The world has moved away from centralized governments and economies, toward decentralized governments and market-driven economies. A pragmatic, non-ideological approach to mixed economic systems is becoming the order of the day, blurring the lines between public and private, and referred to here as the economy without walls. The purpose of Hamlin and Lyons' new work is to synthesize an understanding of the economy without walls, distill the implications of this economy for local communities, and apply knowledge of those implications to guiding communities' development. The book assumes that the use of intersectoral partnerships is an important part of any urban or regional development strategy. It systematically describes such partnerships, including the philosophical foundations of this approach and the financial and non-financial activities used to implement it. The work then discusses trends in the theory and practice of local community management that result from this economic restructuring. The implications of the economy without walls cannot be ignored if urban planners and related professionals are to be effective in the new worldwide environment. This book will be a must-read for scholars, students, and practitioners in urban planning, economic development, and public administration.

Economic inequality continues to contribute to political and social instability around the world. This instability stifles development and results in widening the wealth gap between the "haves" and "have nots," further eroding stability. It has been argued that entrepreneurship is a prime contributor to this vicious cycle. Using Entrepreneurship and Social Innovation to Mitigate Wealth Inequality contends that this is only true when the opportunity for entrepreneurship is limited to a few. The authors maintain that when entrepreneurship is open to anyone who is properly motivated, innovative, and has a goal of growth for their enterprise, it helps build wealth for a greater number of people. The concept of "social entrepreneurship" is introduced, where entrepreneurship becomes a vehicle for explicitly addressing community-based economic and social challenges using markets. The book uses examples of entrepreneurial projects and programs that have attempted to address inequality to discuss entrepreneurship as an economic development strategy and its role in addressing the challenges of economic inequality. It advocates thinking and acting systemically, creating and sustaining entrepreneurial support ecosystems, in order to generate the synergy required to scale-up development and transform our economies and provides a distinctive perspective on a pressing social and economic issue, with significant implications for the future of the United States and the world.

Despite strong U.S. and Canadian economies, economic development remains an important local governmental function, partly to alleviate the persistent poverty that plagues some areas and partly to compete with the activities of neighboring local governments. Those cities, metropolitan areas, rural regions, and states that do not plan effectively lose the battle for economic survival. Local economic development has become a complex and challenging field, with increasing numbers of planners specifically trained for the task. Providing a useful guide for planners and students of planning, this revised and updated edition of Lyons and Hamlin's 1990 book offers a framework for formulating an economic development plan for a local community and explains several emerging strategies. Stating that economic development planning continues to focus too narrowly on job creation at the expense of long-term goals, the authors focus on the secondary and long-term effects of local development activities. Job creation, they claim, should be the end product of a well-considered, comprehensive, rational approach to economic development. The book looks at the objectives of economic planning, offering a broad conception of them, and considers the information needed to plan effectively. Following a discussion of public-private partnership tools in the U.S., the book shows how to translate objectives and data into a program of action, then closes the loop of the planning cycle with a description of program evaluation.