Cities and regions competing in the global economy: knowledge and local development policies

Competitive places have developed diverse, multidimensional ways to attract mobile workers as well as mobile investment. Creative workers are the core of the knowledge economy and account for the varieties in its geography. Benchmarks, including knowledge metrics, innovation indices, and report cards, are increasingly common and increasingly critical to the monitoring of key features of economies and societies whose factors of production and of success are highly mobile. Consequently policies have become more sophisticated, but policy makers need to grasp the nature of place competition and the critical roles of knowledge in the strategies of the most competitive places.