The third attempts to form active public-private leadership coalitions to guide and promote local economic development and actively seeks inclusiveness and collaboration. Examples of these new approaches to be considered here are North Carolina's Research Triangle Park, Cleveland, and the New York metropolitan area's Competitive Region Initiative. At the federal level, the Clinton Administration's use of community empowerment boards to support bottom-up planning strategies in empowerment zones and enterprise communities builds upon the new local energy. This is the summary of Mills's study. In his view, programs packaged as economic development policies are oversold.
Employment gains through multiplier effects are typically grossly exaggerated.
Another fallacy is to ignore the costs of such programs. Whatever taxes or loans are imposed to pay for the policies will have negative multiplier effects that tend to cancel out the job creation claimed for economic development policies. Mills thus offers a comprehensive rebuttal to Bartik's case to intervention. He observed instead that the best economic-development policy a state can follow is to get its fiscal and regulatory house in order.