Business Retention and Expansion (BRE)

Business Retention and Expansion (BRE)
Author: Michael Darger
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 218
Release: 2020-05-21
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0429509251

Business retention and expansion (BRE) is regarded as the most practical and accessible method for economic development at the city, town, or neighborhood scale. This comprehensive volume centers on the belief that BRE is the top responsibility for a community economic development official. BRE is an asset-based approach designed to systematically strengthen the connection between businesses and the community while encouraging each business to continue operations and expand in the community. It focuses on the community’s existing businesses instead of those it doesn’t have. This book illustrates many different facets of BRE, from big-picture and theory to lessons learned about BRE from practitioners and academics with diverse perspectives and backgrounds. The authors demonstrate diverse ways of reaching out and responding to existing businesses. They explore several topics related to or at the very heart of BRE including: business clusters, entrepreneurship, community outcomes, business assistance, transportation systems, energy efficiency, business succession, and defining BRE success. These include research, program evaluation, and case studies. This book offers both theoretical and applied points of views, and will be of great interest to local practitioners, state/provincial officials, and students of economic development. It was originally published as a special issue of the journal Community Development.

Transforming the Appalachian Countryside

Transforming the Appalachian Countryside
Author: Ronald L. Lewis
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
Total Pages: 367
Release: 2000-11-09
Genre: History
ISBN: 0807862975

In 1880, ancient-growth forest still covered two-thirds of West Virginia, but by the 1920s lumbermen had denuded the entire region. Ronald Lewis explores the transformation in these mountain counties precipitated by deforestation. As the only state that lies entirely within the Appalachian region, West Virginia provides an ideal site for studying the broader social impact of deforestation in Appalachia, the South, and the eastern United States. Most of West Virginia was still dominated by a backcountry economy when the industrial transition began. In short order, however, railroads linked remote mountain settlements directly to national markets, hauling away forest products and returning with manufactured goods and modern ideas. Workers from the countryside and abroad swelled new mill towns, and merchants ventured into the mountains to fulfill the needs of the growing population. To protect their massive investments, capitalists increasingly extended control over the state's legal and political systems. Eventually, though, even ardent supporters of industrialization had reason to contemplate the consequences of unregulated exploitation. Once the timber was gone, the mills closed and the railroads pulled up their tracks, leaving behind an environmental disaster and a new class of marginalized rural poor to confront the worst depression in American history.