AG 2011 12 19 - Laserfiche WebLink

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Draft 1.1— For Discussion Only, Not for Citation • Two peer- reviewed studies over the past year have decisively shown that local income growth and jobs growth correlates with presence of smaller businesses. • A growing body of evidence shows that economic - development focused on local business tends to be better at promoting more smart growth, entrepreneurship, self - reliance, sustainability, equality, and participation. And various trends in the economy, such as rising oil prices and spreading internet connectivity, are making local businesses relatively more competitive. • Local businesses are commonly burlesqued as small, boutique, and inconsequential. An editorial in Business Today (September 2011), for example, quips, "We love local tomatoes, but this isn't helping land the jobs that help drive all the economic wheels." In fact, local businesses constitute more than half of every major sector of the economy, including manufacturing. Even local food is as much about the S &D Coffee plant as community gardens. • The case for focusing on local business in Cabarrus County is especially strong, because roughly 83% of existing jobs are in local business. (This also suggests that a 50150 allocation of resources between local and non -local business would still underserve the actual economy.) The Commissions of Cabarrus County asked for this report, and the work underlying it, to explore the contours of a new approach to economic development. Specifically, they were interested is understanding the opportunities for expanding local business and the actions all the sectors of Cabarrus County – private, public, and charitable – could take to seize these opportunities. This paper begins with an overview of the Cabarrus economy. As of 2009, the County had a workforce of about 87,700 paying $3 billion in wages. The annual domestic product of the county (value- added) was about $18 billion. Businesses were paying about $1 billion in taxes. Next, the paper introduces the concept of "Local Living Economies," a framework nearly 100 communities in North America are using to revamp their economic- development policies. Integral to this approach is to identify and plug dollar leakages within the economy —that is, opportunities for substituting for imports through new or expanded local businesses that meet local demand. To measure unmet local demand, the paper then performs two leakage analysis: a simple comparison of each sector with that of a perfectly self- reliant U.S. community (adjusted to Cabarrus's size); and a more sophisticated multiplier analysis of the consequences of meeting all current local demand with expanded local industry. The simple leakage analysis, performed with the online calculators (designed by the author) of the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies, suggests that through self- 2 Attachment number 1 1 -4 Page 304