Third Triangle - Synergies: Economic Promotion, Employment Promotion, Urban/Regional Development

Local economic development is not just about things like business promotion, SME support and microenterprise promotion.

• The overarching goal of LED is to create jobs and income, and therefore it is crucial to involve employment promotion measures and organizations in a given LED effort. Employment creation and poverty alleviation, however, is also a distinct activity with its own delivery structure, and it is usually addressed as part of social policy. This, in turn, leads to something which is often a major confusion in LED: the distinction between economic development (business promotion) and community development (employment creation, poverty alleviation). Sometimes these activities get mixed up, and as a result usually neither economic nor social objectives are achieved.
• One of the key issues of LED is to enhance the locational quality of a given place. If you look at the tangible and intangible locational factors, you find that some of them are closely related to business promotion, whereas many other have to do with issues which are usually addressed under the heading of Urban Development, which has its own concepts and approaches - and often a much longer time horizon than LED.

From the perspective of a business promotion agency /actor, it is crucial, in order to design and implement an adequate LED effort, to understand what is going on in these two neighboring fields: What are the main concepts and instruments used there, and what tensions exist between the three fields?

But it also must ask: What are the synergies which can be realized by connecting concepts, measures and actors from these different fields?

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