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Mountain Monitor - 3rd Quarter 2013, Kenan Fikri, Mark Muro

Mountain Monitor Quarterly

The quarter’s Mountain Monitor marks the four-year anniversary of Brookings Mountain West's quarterly tracking of the uneven pace of recovery across the major metro areas of the Intermountain West and it finds that, although the region continues to outperform the national economy the rate of recovery slowed moderately in the region’s metro areas.

As a group, Mountain region metro areas advanced on all four indicators of economic recovery tracked by the Monitor—employment, output, unemployment, and house prices—but their progress was more restrained in the third quarter of 2013 than it was in the second.

Beneath the regional headline of moderating …

Mountain Monitor - 2nd Quarter 2013, Kenan Fikri, Mark Muro

Mountain Monitor Quarterly

Economic recovery progressed steadily across the metropolitan Mountain West in the second quarter of 2013. Many of the region’s major metro areas counted among the strongest economic performers nationally, but output growth slowed over the quarter and the region‘s unemployment recovery looked to be stagnating. Moderate job growth and a fast and accelerating housing recovery buoyed the Mountain West economy in the second quarter.

Tax Increment Financing Trends In Southern Maine 2001-2011, Kevin Price

Muskie School Capstones and Dissertations

Tax Increment Financing (TIF) is an economic development tool authorized for use in 49 states and the District of Columbia. TIFs are a very popular economic development tool that allow for a low-cost way to fund development projects. A TIF is designed to turn an undesirable or underdeveloped area into a developed, revenue generating area. The restrictions as to the exact types of property that quality for TIF vary from state to state, but they generally are used to target underdeveloped areas to encourage growth. Maine places several limitations on TIFs including acreage caps, a value cap, a municipal indebtedness …

Mountain Monitor-1st Quarter 2013, Kenan Fikri, Mark Muro

Mountain Monitor Quarterly

Economic recovery gained strength across the major metro areas of the Mountain West in the first quarter of 2013. Multiple metro areas achieved long-awaited full employment recoveries in the first quarter and regional production surpassed pre-recession levels of output for the first time. The region’s strong housing rebound continued to be a boon. Additionally, a special supplement to the Monitor shows that the healthcare sector has been an outsized contributor to recovery throughout the region. Despite progress on multiple fronts, though, many Mountain metro areas remain scarred with high unemployment rates, severely depressed house prices, and daunting jobs deficits.

Tourism, Development And Poverty Reduction In Guizhou And Yunnan, John A. Donaldson

John Donaldson

How did the differing strategies adopted to develop tourism in Guizhou and Yunnan affect patterns of economic development and poverty reduction? The answer is paradoxical. Both provincial governments incorporated tourism as part of their overall development strategies, but their tourism sites were distributed and structured strikingly differently. In Yunnan, although tourism contributed to rapid economic growth, it did not reduce rural poverty as much as might be expected from a large rural-based industry. By contrast, Guizhou's relatively small-scale tourism industry, although not contributing significantly to growth, was distributed largely in poor areas and was structured to allow poor people to …