For Professionals in Adjacent Fields
Your Work Deals With Economy and Place
Economic Development Is Everyone's Business. Find the Guidance Built for Yours.
Planning, property, higher education, skills, government, community development — your decisions shape local economies, and local economies shape your work. This handbook gives you the economic grounding to engage with real confidence: to read the forces behind your own field, ask the questions that matter, and hold your own whenever the economy is on the table.
Below you’ll find tailored guidance for each of the professional audiences the handbook serves — what’s most relevant to your work, which chapters to prioritise, and what you’ll be able to do differently once you’ve read it.
For Planning Professionals
Town & City Planners
Understand the economic forces behind the spatial decisions you make every day. Build the evidence literacy to interrogate economic development arguments — and make better ones yourself.
For Real Estate and Property Professionals
Real Estate & Property
The economics of why locations win or lose, how clusters and agglomeration drive commercial demand, and how to engage with the public sector economic development partnerships that increasingly shape your major projects.
For Higher Education Professionals
Universities & Higher Education
Navigate the civic university agenda, knowledge exchange expectations, and local growth partnerships with a genuine understanding of the economic development system you’re expected to help shape — and what that system can and cannot deliver.
For Skills & Employment Professionals
Skills & Employment
Connect provision design, employer engagement, and workforce development to the labour market intelligence and economic strategy that should be driving them. Close the gap between skills supply and real economic demand.
For Government & Civil Servants
Government & Civil Servants
Design, fund, and evaluate economic development interventions with a clear-eyed understanding of why programmes so often underdeliver — and what the evidence says about doing it better in conditions of real political and resource complexity.
For Community Leaders & Anchor Institutions
Community Leaders & Anchor Institutions
Understand the economic development system well enough to engage with it on your own terms — not just as a consultee who is thanked and summarised in an appendix, but as a voice with the knowledge and language to shape outcomes.
Ready to advance your knowledge, skills and practice?
Chapters in the book
PART I: FOUNDATIONS
1. Rationale 11
2. Introducing Local & Regional Economic Development Functions 33
3. Megatrends 53
4. Essential Economics 71
5. Policy 99
6. Strategy 129
7. Informed Decision-Making 165
8. Economic Development Theories 187
PART II: PRACTICE
9. Industrial Development & Clusters 225
10. Enterprise & Entrepreneurship 261
11. FDI and Inward Investment 303
12. Innovation 339
13. Education & Skills 369
14. Economic Participation, Employability, & Unemployment 403
15. Poverty & Inequality 435
16. Place, Infrastructure & Real Estate 469
17. Low Carbon, Climate Change, & Sustainability 495
PART III: CONCLUSIONS
18. Applying This Handbook - Key Lessons for Practice 529