The information economy and American cities /

The seeming collapse of manufacturing employment in the early 1980s led city officials in the US to consider services as the new source of growth, particularly services that involved highly educated labor and information technologies. These officials also developed an aversion to industrial specialization. Drennan (city and regional planning, Cornell Univ.) assesses the degree to which specialization in information-based industries contributed to economic growth after 1980. Focusing on six clusters of traded goods and services, he documents national sectoral shifts. Then, using Bureau of Economic Analysis data, he develops regression models to gauge the influence of specialization, population size, and human capital on per capita income for all metropolitan areas. Areas that specialized in financial or other producer services, as measured by earnings, were found to be the most economically successful, including having lower levels of poverty and improved income distributions. Areas that specialized in manufacturing or goods distribution had lower levels of economic and demographic growth. Sprinkled with challenges to conventional wisdom, this book provides solid empirical documentation of sectoral change in US metropolitan areas and makes an important contribution to the literature on the information economy. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Graduate and research collections. R. A. Beauregard New School University