| One purpose of this study was to determine whether is any relationship between funds spent for economic development in cities and measures of social welfare in the same communities. Another purpose was to assess the nature of urban economic development policies in terms of perceived objectives, use of resources to support specific actions, and beliefs concerning the feasibility of public entrepreneurialism.;The design of the investigation was empirical, employing a survey questionnaire distributed to randomly selected cities in the United States with populations of 50,000 or more. Survey data from 40 responding city officials were used, along with federal socioeconomic statistics from the same cities, in a series of statistical tests using SPSSx routines of t-test and linear regression. In addition, frequency distributions were employed to permit analysis of development policies and beliefs of the city officials.;The principal study results were as follows: (1) No relationship was established concerning whether city entrepreneurial-type funding results in improvements in measures of social welfare. (2) A provisional conclusion was made that funding for all types of economic development activities (including entrepreneurial) does not result in improvements in social welfare. (3) City officials generally agreed on the nature of objectives for economic development programs, particularly that employment would be reduced, a better choice of jobs and lifestyles would result, and a more stable economic base would be obtained. (4) Officials demonstrated a consensus in either strongly accepting or rejecting specific economic development measures as policy. For the most part, less conservative activities (mostly entrepreneurial) are employed to a much lesser degree than more traditional means. (5) Although city officials accepted entrepreneurial-type activities in theory, they did not endorse specific actions in practice, indicating also that such actions received only a third of all economic development funding. Further, they reported a somewhat decreasing trend in money commitments for entrepreneurial activities compared to other economic development funding, despite a generally increasing trend for economic development funds of all types. |
