Brookings Provides Regional Strategies to Improve Great Lakes' Economy

As Ohio's General Assembly is poised to vote this week on whether or not to join a multi-state/province compact to govern use of Great Lake waters, the Brookings Institution is recommending a similar regional approach for coping with the area's economic future.



The states within the Great Lakes region need to leverage their aggregate strengths and implement a number of policy innovations in order to adapt to the changing nature of the economy, according to a report released by the Metropolitan Policy Program of the Brookings Institution. The Vital Center: A Federal-State Compact to Renew the Great Lakes Region defines this region as the parts of 12 states that share a common geography, history, access to natural resources and economy - an economy that is struggling to change its perception from a rust belt area to one based on knowledge production.



Using a systems approach to identify policy recommendations for the region, the Brookings report provides solutions within educational, economic, social, and infrastructure contexts. Additionally, it advises that the region, with its 97 million inhabitants, leverage its political size in the upcoming 2008 election season. By working together rather than competing against each other, the region's leaders can develop and advocate a common vision to ameliorate the prosperity of the region.



The region's lagging spirit of entrepreneurialism, Brookings claims, is a combination of three likely forces: low overall levels of education and the out-migration of talent from the region, a lack of a significant amount of venture capital funds, and a culture formed from several generations of industrial employment that is averse to change and risk.



To overcome these forces, Brookings offers policy suggestions at both the state and federal level, covering a variety of topics to advance the economic development of the Great Lakes region. TBED suggestions, which may fall under the jurisdiction of the states, include:

• Matching federal student grants with an unrestricted grant that provides two years of education at a lowest-cost public community college or university (the paper recommends that this initiative serve as a brain gain program, open to any student in the world who desires to study at postsecondary institutions in the region);
• Collectively, creating an "in-region" tuition agreement in which anyone living in the Great Lakes states pays in-state tuition rates to attend any higher education institution within the region;
• Providing funds to match federal research funding possibly using pension funds, bonds, university endowments, and tobacco settlement;
• Instituting incentives to encourage students to attain early college credit and to enroll in the science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) disciplines; and,
• Building a Great Lakes Regional Venture Capital Fund to assist emerging companies, utilizing state pension funds and possibly university endowments, private pension funds and foundations as sources for the fund.

The Vital Center: A Federal-State Compact to Renew the Great Lakes Region is available at:

http://www.brookings.edu/metro/pubs/20061020_renewgreatlakes.htm.



Links to this paper and nearly 4,500 additional TBED-related research reports, strategic plans and other papers can be found at the Tech-based Economic Development (TBED) Resource Center, jointly developed by the Technology Administration and SSTI, at: http://www.tbedresourcecenter.org/.