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Assessing the impact of regeneration spending: lessons from the United Kingdom and the wider world

Yes / The government increased the funding for regional development agencies to £2.3 billion in 2007/8, yet hard evidence on the effectiveness of the spending is difficult to find. Techniques for valuing benefits in difficult areas have existed for many years. They range from the hedonic methods and contingent valuation studies of environmental economists to the estimates of shadow wage rates used by development economists to take account of the economic value of additional employment. The latter have been used for years in some of the poorest developing countries in the world, as well as some countries in the European Union. Meanwhile some attempts to capture the indirect benefits of regeneration spending have surfaced through the United States with the ‘Social Return on Investment’ and Local Multiplier 3, yet the proponents of these approaches do not seem to have come across the abundant literature on the use of shadow pricing in the context of developing countries. This article attempts to explore the extent to which practices used and lessons learned in the economic analysis of environmental impacts and of investments in developing countries can inform the evaluation and appraisal of regeneration projects in the United Kingdom.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:BRADFORD/oai:bradscholars.brad.ac.uk:10454/13228
Date16 December 2008
CreatorsPotts, David J.
Source SetsBradford Scholars
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeArticle, Accepted Manuscript
Rights© 2008 Taylor & Francis. The Version of Record of this manuscript has been published and is available in Education, Knowledge and Economy in 2008 at https://doi.org/10.1080/17496890802426238.

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