更好地建立：十亿美元用于扩大经济机会的投资

今天，美国经济发展局和拜登总统announcedBuild Back Bord Boter Regional Challenge（BBBRC）的获奖者是对投资不足的社区的10亿美元投资，这是整个联邦政府令人兴奋的趋势的最前沿。

Currently, there are only ahandful具有“行业和人力资本的坚实基地的城市，要一直吸引好雇主并提供高工资”。BBBRC的目标是从根本上改变这一点 - 它是在完美的时代到达的。如2021年4月的第一天项目备忘录中所述”共同繁荣的区域中心”斯科特·雷斯尼克（Scott Resnick）撰写，“互联网功能，通信工具和信息技术方面的进步使更多的人比以往任何时候都可以使用企业家精神。”

The 21 award-winning regions will receive between $25 million and $65 million to fund a total of 123 projects that will begin fundamentally reshaping the economic prowess of 24 U.S. states. These investments will focus on cultivating 21st-century industries like biotechnology, health care, clean energy, advanced mobility, next-gen manufacturing, defense, and more. You can learn all about the list of selected projects and the funding they’ll receivehere。

This is notable not just for the investment in scientific research, but also for the transparency and communication for the process. In sharing the list of 60 finalists and their proposals (a tactic developed even further by the NSF Engines program), we now have transparent information about the themes in where these communities see their future, and basis on which to make competitive decisions. This was laid out as a core tenet of how to move forward in Jonathan Gruber and Simon Johnson’sJump-Starting America。

在这一庆祝时刻，值得暂停，以突出60个地区的更广泛的决赛入围者团体所取得的成就。这些联盟代表了从土著社区和农村城镇到历史上由煤矿开采或心脏枢纽驱动的社区，以恢复活力。这些决赛入围者各自带来了独特的区域资源，包括在大学和国家实验室中利用总计300亿美元的联邦研发投资。

We bore witness to many of these novel collaborations as core members of thetechnical assistance coalitionsupporting the implementation of the BBBRC, along with our colleagues at America Achieves, Drexel University’s Nowak Metro Finance Lab, and the National League of Cities. What we found was remarkable.

This experience was not just rewarding, but inspiring. The federal government was intentionally investing in building ecosystems — orclustersof universities, companies, philanthropies, unions, nonprofits, and even governor’s offices — to spur local and national economic competitiveness. These clusters varied tremendously, asdescribed由我们的同事布鲁斯·卡茨（Bruce Katzfull advantageof the given region’s cultural assets, natural resources, research institutions, demographic strengths, or transportation infrastructure.

Research has described anunparalleled multipliereffect of investing in innovation sectors, with each new high-tech industry job spawning five additional jobs outside of the sector in occupations like lawyers, teachers, nurses, waiters, and hairdressers. Toborrow从亚历杭德拉·Y. Castillo（Alejandra Y. Castillo）的经济发展助理部长开始，“ BBBRC是EDA方法的发展。”

The announcement of the BBBRC communities is the first step toward distributing themore than $10 billion in cluster development funds已由联邦政府占有。NSF发动机计划是另一个集群开发工作，正在等待其提案期的截止日期，而筹码和科学法案资助的新计划不会落后。简而言之，这不仅代表了EDA的方法的变化，还代表了联邦政府认为其在经济发展中的作用的方式，它是其认为的工作的方式作为economic development.

To be clear, top-down economic development is a复杂过程。It depends on the interregional spillovers of private and university knowledge, frequent face-to-face contact and knowledge-sharing between capable workforces, and sufficient resources for startups to commercialize research from labs to the marketplace.

但是BBBRC是一项计划从一开始就计划这些变量的投资计划。例如，EDA增加了大学实验室的研发机会将通过创建重视环绕式发展的申请评估标准来实现商业规模并创造高薪工作的机会，其中包括：

• Resourcing investment funds to attract and support entrepreneurs and spinoff startups;
• 资助与工会同行的劳动力发展计划；
• Requiring partnerships with companies that include hiring from these workforce programs;
• 确保政治保证，匹配的贡献以及其他实物支持该行业的承诺。

BBBRC是并且应该只是这种基于集群的创新策略的开始。采用这种方法的计划将在最终获奖者的两种直接成果中产生股息，但也将在决赛入围者召集的国家竞争力量的富有成果的合作中获得外部性。应该考虑采用这些策略的更雄心勃勃的计划来增强我们国家的竞争力。而且它无需停止新策略。我们对联邦计划的分析发现，在16个机构中，现有的28个现有和即将进行的资金计划可以帮助支持集群开发工作。这些机构和计划经理有机会加倍介绍，不仅是集群发展，而且在这些社区上。

同样，正如Ishan在最近一天的一个项目备忘录中所要求的那样。Creating the Make it in America Regional Challenge，“应对紧急通货膨胀和供应链挑战的一种方法是，通过发起100亿美元的两阶段竞争来提高非巨星地区拥有综合供应链解决方案的能力，以对研究，制造和分销进行研究，制造和分销。这将授予30-50个区域计划补助金，然后授予10-15个最高赢家，最高10亿美元，以增强与关键的美国供应链优先事项（例如，半导体，锂电池等）相吻合的经济群集的区域能力。”

As BBBRC communities get to work, they represent our best hope for greater opportunity across the country. They will need to work hard to maintain the coalitions that have made them successful. They will need to broaden them to ensure that their work has equitable impacts, and they’ll need to continue to reach out for leveraged funding and support from local and national funders. In short, this announcement doesn’t represent an end, but the beginning of the work and a new opportunity for growth in these 21 regions.