Defining and Measuring Economic Development: A Literature Review and Outlook

. Defining and measuring economic


Introduction
Economic development is far from a homogeneous and well-organized field of applied research.The number of relevant articles on economic development has increased over time.However, there is not a definite, categorical, and settled definition for economic development, nor a comprehensive measure that is agreed upon as there is still a wide variety of different methods and definitions being used to conceptualize and measure economic development.This is a problem for not only researchers trying to make sense of economic development as a practice and phenomenon, it also is a problem for practitioners in the applied field, because without a clear and agreed upon set of definitions for economic development performance, there is no way to know if what practitioners are doing really is effective at accomplishing the intended goals.
In absence of a single agreed upon definition or comprehensive measure, are there patterns or consistent approaches to define and measure economic development?Furthermore, and more specifically, considering that the classical aim of economic development is to improve people's material standards of living, how are these improvements defined and measured?The research summarized in this article aims to shed light on this question, which is worthy of further exploration for several reasons.First, economic development has emerged as an interdisciplinary field of scientific inquiry focusing on the economical, managerial, political, legal, social, and cultural aspects of this multi-faceted topic.Yet, the issue of defining and measuring economic development has been overlooked thus far, thence the importance to consolidate 'what we know' about this topic.By synthesizing and critically analyzing the existing evidence, we are able to identify trends, patterns, and gaps in the research.This is important as it helps to identify areas of research in the economic development literature that have been extensively covered and highlight those areas that would benefit much from attention by researchers in the field.It also allows to form a balanced perspective on the state of knowledge in the field that includes different points of view.Second, no literature review has been conducted so far, to the best knowledge of the authors, with this particular focus on defining and measuring the improvements in people's material standard of living as a result of economic development efforts, thence the distinctive contribution of this article to the literature.Third, this article bridges the more pure and specific development subject area with economic development focused studies in the public administration subject area, given the extensive interest of the topic for public administration scholars.
A useful starting point to address the aforementioned limitation lies in taking stock of the extant scholarly work in the field.This study aims to fill this gap through a literature review of the scholarly publications 1950-2020 in the public administration and development subject areas, in which 'economic development', and 'measurement' are mentioned.Further details on our methods are reported in the next section.We identified 372 publications that examine how economic development is defined and measured.The analysis led us to identify a total of 19 themes emerging from the scientific literature, each providing an angle from which to examine this multi-faceted topic from improving the tangible or intangible condition of people to concerns about the production of businesses and their processes, from health as a facet of economic development to the use of Public-Private Partnerships as economic development tools, to how political discourses and opinions may influence economic development outcomes to issues of moving goods and people around in physical spaces.
The article unfolds as follows: First, our methodological approach is presented.Second, we describe the identified corpus of the literature.Third, the overall findings of the review are summarized.Finally, we discuss the state of research on measuring economic development and we provide our recommendations in this regard.

Methodological Approach
Measuring economic development is not a well-defined topic in both the public administration and development literatures.The overall methodological approach of this literature review follows the one proposed by Arksey and O'Malley (2005) for scoping reviews, which have been defined by Mays et al. (2004) as a way to map "the key concepts underpinning a research area and the main sources and types of evidence available, and can be undertaken as stand-alone projects in their own right, especially where an area is complex or has not been reviewed comprehensively before" (p.94).
The following criteria have been used to identify the studies included in this literature review.First, the so-called 'grey literature' was deliberately excluded (Rothstein & Hopewell, 2009) and only peer-reviewed published articles were included.Second, only English-language peerreviewed journals were included.Third, the journals were pulled from the Scimago Journal & Country Rank database from the public administration and development subject areas.We decided to use the Scimago Journal & Country Rank (SJR) because is a free online database, which makes use of data from Scopus (while Thomson Reuters' Impact Factor is based on Web of Science database).The SJR algorithm is applied to a larger set of journals (Scopus data instead of Web of Science data) and differently from Thomson Reuters' Impact Factor takes into consideration not only the number of citation but also the prestige of the citing journals (Mañana-Rodríguez, 2015).Table 4 presents the full list of peer-reviewed journals included in this review of the literature with the counts of articles found in those journals.Fourth, per each identified peer-reviewed journal, a systematic keyword search within the title and abstract was conducted.The keywords used for the searches were 'economic development' and 'measur*', which was truncated with an asterisk to include derivative words such as but not limited to measuring, measure, measured.Fifth, the time frame selected for the searches was all the articles published between 1950 and 2020 and articles without years listed were dropped.These selection criteria of the search process yielded to the identification of 372 peer-reviewed journal articles.
Inductive coding (Chandra & Shang, 2019) has been applied to classify the selected literature.Themes, improvements, and methods that were found in previous efforts had keywords associated with them to make analyzing the corpus faster and more efficient.The keywords were curated to align with the themes, improvement, and method categories conceptually to provide us clues about the articles' contents.The keywords were searched for in the articles' titles, abstracts, and manual tags using an Excel search function.Table 1 shows the keywords that were used to search for the themes of the articles with the count values of each theme and thematic macro-category.Table 2 shows the keywords that were used to search for the improvements that were being made in the studies, as well as the count values for each improvement category and improvement macro-category.Table 3 shows the keywords that were used to identify the methods that were used in the articles as well as the count values of the number of articles found in each method category.Note, some of the keywords appear in both the themes and improvements.We do not believe this will bias the results because we are simply using the keywords to classify the articles.This is because the keywords that are the same are appropriate to identify their themes and improvements, are mixed with other keywords to make each category unique and are not being used to conduct a quantitative analysis where such conditions can lead to problems with multicollinearity.
The results of the keyword searches were totaled up by their respective theme, improvement, or method.Articles were classified by a combination of reading the article abstracts and titles, and observing the total values of each theme, improvement, and method category.This provided us with the total number of times each category had one of its keywords mentioned in the articles' titles, abstracts, or manual tags, and the total number of articles that fit into each theme, improvement, or method.To increase coding reliability, each article was independently coded by the two authors (Lipsey & Wilson, 2001).All coding disagreements were discussed by the two authors and resolved thus improving inter-rater reliability (Littell et al., 2008).Information about the theme of the articles was coded along with the information about the nature of the specific improvements that were made in the article's definition of economic development and the type of method that was used in the article.A total of fifty disagreements were discussed for the themes of economic development, forty-eight disagreements were discussed for the nature of the improvements, and forty-one disagreements were discussed for the method categories.All disagreements were discussed and resolved by the authors.19 codes were identified with this process for the themes of the articles, as well as 14 types of improvements, and 4 method categories.
In addition to the three sets of coding categories, we extrapolated higher-level macrogroupings to further classify the themes and improvement codes.This was done to discover possible patterns in the articles' thematic content and the types of improvements that were being targeted or carried out in the articles by their subjects.The themes could be classified by whether they occur as antecedents, tools, or outcomes in economic development.Antecedents are themes that act as prerequisites for economic development of any kind to occur.Tools are used in economic development articles to accomplish the outcomes of economic development, and outcomes are the themes that are the desired goals of economic development.The improvements were classified as to whether they were conceptually physical or social in nature.Physical improvements were improvements that affected the tangible, material world we can directly observe and experience.Social improvements were defined as intangible improvements to phenomena that only exist in the subjective and inter-subjective experiences of people.The counts of the themes, improvements, and methods reflect the number of articles that were classified under the categories.Some of the themes and improvements had two or more categories applied to them.We feel that these counts are sufficient to understand the content of the literature corpus given the time and resource constraints of this literature review (Arksey & O'Malley, 2005).The method categories are more directly related to the material and only 4 categories were explored.We did not make higher-level classifications for the methods categories because they would not be meaningful in our analysis.
Table 1 lists the codes for the themes used and provides their brief description.It also shows the themes according to their macro-classification type and the keywords that were used to identify them.Table 2 lists the same information for the improvement codes.Table 3 shows the same for the method categories.

Describing the Corpus of Literature
Before discussing the emerging measures and approaches in the literature of economic development, data will first be described.Most of the journals we found articles in belong to the development subject area (N=69), followed by public administration (N=35).The number of articles found in development subject area journals (N=298) was significantly higher than the number of articles found in public administration journals (N=69).Only one journal, Public Administration and Development is counted in both subject categories with some articles published in it (N=5).
As shown in Table 4, the most prolific journals with the highest number of eligible published articles are Asian Economic Journal (N=26), Transportation (N=22), and Food Security (N=16) in the development subject area; Human Resources for Health (N=7), The Innovation Journal (N=7), Canadian Public Policy and Nonprofit Policy Forum (tied, N=5) in the public administration subject area.
As shown in Table 1, most of the articles have been classified as Outcomes of economic development (N=339).Among those, the majority of them were coded as Comprehensive (N=166), followed by Sustainability (N=58), and Quality of life (N=31).There were 176 articles classified as Tools (N=9) articles on theories on economic development (Theoretical).As apparent from these numbers, and as explained above in the methodology section, it is clear that some articles were double coded because, for example, they discussed both a tool of economic development and an associated outcome.
Similarly, Table 2 reports the article count for coding improvement types and definitions.320 articles were coded as Social/Intangible and 224 as Physical/Tangible.Among the Physical/Tangible, the Productivity of economic wealth and/or resources was detected in (N=73) instances, Physical Infrastructure and Support had (N=42), and Environmental improvements was found in (N=38) articles.Among the Social/Intangible, the object of improvement most studied is on governmental systems, policies, or relations in formal institutional arrangements that are condoned by or include government organizations (Public Sector/Formal Institution), which was detected in (N=125) articles, while social infrastructure support was detected in (N=68) articles.Finally, Table 3 shows that quantitative methods were most often used in the literature on economic development (N=165), theoretical was second (N=83), qualitative was third (N=79), and mixed methods was a distant fourth (N=37).A total of (N=8) articles did not identify the research method(s) used in the article abstracts or titles.
To illustrate scholars' interest in the concepts of this review of the literature, Figure 1 shows the number of publications by 5-year interval from the year of our first article to 2020 .The first two decades saw a relatively low number of articles published meeting our review criteria, ranging from four publications between 1986 and 1990 to   The diversity of themes that were discussed also increased in each decade.Table A in the Appendix shows the distribution of the article themes over time.The largest thematic subcategory that was discussed between 1986 and 1990 was Business Development (N=2).In the first half the 1990s, there was an increase in the number of articles in the Comprehensive theme increased to 7 followed by Transportation and Sustainability (tied, N=3).In the early 2000s, Comprehensive (N=9), Finance (N=5), and Sustainability (N=4) themes were most common.In the late 2000s, Comprehensive (N=10), Sustainability (N=6), and Research (N=5) were most common.In the first half the 2010s, the most common themes were Comprehensive (N=33), Sustainability (N=14), and Finance, Transportation, and Politics (tied, N=6).Between 2016 and 2020, the number of articles in the Comprehensive category jumped to 102, the number of articles in the Finance category jumped 39, followed by articles in the Sustainability category (N=31).The distribution of the themes over the years shows what the literature was focusing on during that time period.Institutions sub-category with 76 articles, followed by Productivity (N=48) and Social Infrastructure Supports (N=45).

Results
This section of the article discusses the results found among the themes the corpus was divided into.It starts with the findings in the macro-categories of the themes before going on to discuss the improvements.Within each heading will be a discussion on the macro-categories, followed by the sub-categories that composed them.We will briefly discuss all theme and improvement sub-categories within their respective macro-categories, taking note of what was more and less commonly discussed.Table C in the Appendix lists all the themes in alphabetical order, with the articles' citations and a list of the metrics that were commonly used in each sub-category.

Macro-Categories of the Themes Antecedents of Economic Development
There were 85 articles whose outcomes fit the role of an antecedent in economic development.
Finance was by far the largest of the Antecedent sub-categories (N=54).The other two antecedent categories we were able to identify were Politics (N=22) and Theoretical (N=9).
We can see from the articles' thematic classifications and subject matter that decisions related to the Antecedents are important decisions to have settled before attempting economic development in a place.Economic development cannot occur without considering the politics and the different facets of politics that happen in a place.Nor can economic development occur without an understanding of how projects will be financed and valued after they are finished, and a theoretical vision of how social dynamics work and how conditions can be for a community of people.There appear to be opportunities for researchers to further develop our understanding of how economic development affects and is affected by the financial opportunities that are available for communities.Researchers and practitioners can work together with the communities they serve to develop a better theoretical understanding of economic development's potential to benefit life and living conditions.

Tools of Economic Development
There were several more articles that had a sub-category theme classified in the Tools of economic development macro-category (N=176).Three of the sub-categories under the Tools macro-category had more than thirty articles classified under them.The top three subcategory themes under Tools of economic development that were studied were Research (N=41), Regionalism (N=39), and Transportation (N=34).These three categories make sense having the largest number of articles, since studying economic development (Research) is an important part of economic development itself, looking at economic development from a regional or larger scale geographic perspective (Regionalism) is one of the major foci in economic development and Transportation is without any doubt on important tool in economic development.
Minor, yet still important, sub-categories of themes include Business development (N=19), which is another very important tool for economic development; Placebased (N=16), Planning (N=10), Public-Private Partnership (N=3).We can see how each of these Tool-type themes can conceptually be linked together to give substance to economic development outcomes.Important facets of ensuring the attractiveness and prosperity of a place (e.g., place-based policies, planning, taxes) are minor themes in the most influential journals.But it makes sense that Research and Regionalism would be the most represented categories of economic development.

Outcomes of Economic Development
The largest macro-category theme that was covered in the economic development literature centered on conceptual Outcomes of economic development (N=339).Most of these articles were conceptually oriented to the Comprehensive sub-category (N=166), which included holistic and generic measurements of economic development, such as Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per capita or median income.Sustainability (N=58), Quality of Life (N=31), Change in Society (N=27), and Distribution (N=23) sub-categories were also well represented, addressing environmental or social sustainability, large scale shifts in society and its material conditions, and the allocation of wealth in the economy.Minor Outcome themes with less than or equal to twenty articles include Health (N=20), and Poverty (N=14).
The number of articles in each of the Outcome sub-categories were not surprising.GDP and income are the most used metrics of economic development, even in articles that did not have comprehensive wealth generation as its main theme.But the relatively low attention to Quality-of-Life is concerning, especially since this sub-category refers to improvements or improving the tangible or intangible condition of people.Furthermore, although represented with respectively 27 and 23 articles, we were expecting more attention to how economic development activities can change and affect societies (Change in Society) and how wealth is allocated in the economy (Distribution).This also leaves a significant gap in our understanding of economic development practices.A possible explanation is that Change in Society is harder to describe and conceptually operationalize for empirical research.We can make use of historical data and events from societies and cultures that have long ceased to exist to get a better understanding in the Change in Society sub-category.

Physical/Tangible
Articles under the Physical/Tangible improvement macro-category represented a large portion of the total number of articles (N=224).The distribution of articles among the subcategories of improvements was relatively even spread, though there are some champions.The Productivity (Resource/Finance) and Physical Infrastructure Supports were the largest of the Physical/Tangible articles with, respectively, 73 and 42 articles.This suggests economic development is intimately related to the allocation of resources in a society, either by public sector policies or market forces and the availability and presence of physical infrastructures.Environmental had (N=38) articles, followed by Generic Wealth Improvement (N=23), Built Environment (N=18), and Physical Health (N=17).Resource Distribution has 11 articles, while Place-based has 2 articles.
We can see again that issues related to distribution are not widely researched in journals of empirical research as well as are the articles in the Place-based sub-category.Interestingly, the implications of economic development on health doesn't have much representation in this corpus either.This is unfortunate, because the ways we make and distribute wealth do have profound implications for how healthy each and all of us are.Built Environment and Generic Wealth Improvements are also moderately well studied.

Social/Intangible
Interestingly, the Social/Intangible macro-category of improvements had a lot more articles overall than the Physical/Intangible macro-category with (N=320).This was mainly driven by the number of articles that focused on the Public Sector/Formal Institutions improvement category (N=125) and the Social Infrastructure Supports category (N=68).This is interesting, because it shows that a lot of attention is paid to what the government does in the economic development literature.This suggests that the public sector and the intangible or social service aspects of publicly available infrastructure systems that exist in a society are important and closely related to the topic of economic development, even more so than the activities that businesses choose to do to add value.In particular, the special attention paid to social infrastructure in the economic development is interesting because it is practically much more difficult to find a way to independent prosperity without public services that ensure a solid floor on which people can build their lives and livelihoods.Having the costs of food alleviated through programs like EBT/SNAP, or the cost of healthcare kept low by a universal, singlepayer public system are just two easy examples of social services that can reduce overall individual living expenses and allow every person's current income to take them that much further towards a satisfying and comfortable life.Beyond these two largest sub-categories of improvements, the remaining articles were clustered under improvements to Innovation/Research (N=48), Anti-poverty (N=34), Social Relations (N=30), Business Activity (N=15).These other sub-categories under the Social/Intangible macro-category (Innovation/Research, Anti-poverty, Social Relations, Business Activity) were also somewhat well represented in the corpus of literature.Social Relations was the most surprising Social/Intangible sub-category with a considerable number of articles attributable to it.This shows how, despite the physical and technical aspects of economic development, the process remains a primarily human-driven phenomenon that requires multiple, possibly competing stakeholders, to somehow come together to get things done for their communities.Surprisingly, Business Activity is the least studied sub-category in the corpus.

Measurements of Economic Development Themes
Table C in the Appendix lists all the themes in alphabetical order, with the articles' citations and a list of the metrics that were commonly used in each sub-category.After having presented all the themes we identified from the corpus of the literature and the types of improvements in economic development, we now present a selection of economic development indicators and indexes used in the articles identified in the literature review.Overall, the metrics and indexes used to measure economic development for each of the identified themes have both construct and face validity: the operationalization of economic development aligns with the underlying theoretical frameworks identified in each of the 19 themes and they appear, on their face, to measure what they claim to measure.There are of course some disputable cases listed in Table C, but overall the assessment is positive.
We now present and discuss some of these indicators and indexes for the most relevant identified 19 themes.Economic development in the theme Business Development, which concerns the production of businesses and their processes, has been measured by using the 'Firm survival rate' and the 'Ease of Doing Business index' provided by World Bank respectively in Fertala ( 2008) and in Dong and Manning (2017).In the theme Change in Society, which discusses large scale shifts in society and its material conditions, economic development has been measured, among the others, with 'foreign trade development', 'improved investment potential', and 'efficient foreign debt management' as in the article by Gogorishvili (2016).Economic development in the theme Comprehensive, which refers to economic development in multiple facets, has been measured by using 'private GDP growth' by Afonso and Jalles (2016).In the theme Distribution, which focuses on the allocation of wealth in the economy, economic development has been measured, among the others, with 'reductions in regional economic inequalities' by Bonfiglio et al. (2016) and with 'infant mortality rate' by Salahuddin et al. (2020).Economic development in the theme Finance, which focuses on the raising of financial capital or financial markets for business development, has been measured, for example, by using the 'Venture capital performance for early entrepreneurs' in Baldock ( 2016).
In the theme Health, which focuses on the physical or psychological health of the population, economic development has been measured, among the others, with 'skill of birth attendants in low-and middle-income countries' by Lassi et al. ( 2016) and with 'adoption rate of information communication technologies in healthcare' by Baridam and Govender (2019).Economic development in the theme Housing, which discusses housing as a facet of economic development, has been measured, for example, by using the 'interrelationship between bank credits, unemployment, interest rates, and house rental prices' in Kupčinskas and Paškevičius (2020).Economic development in the theme Planning, which focuses on the practice of planning places instead of the end-products, has been measured, for example, by using the 'urban sprawl prevention into rural land' and 'network density for transportation project' in Walter and Scholz (2007)

Discussion
This article investigates the manifold definitions and measures of economic development.
Through it, we hope to provide a step forward in scholarly understanding and use of this concept of economic development in both the public administration and development literatures.We have identified nineteen themes and could group them into three macrocategories.We also found fourteen single types of improvements that were made in the articles, around which it is possible to group this topic, and presented some of the indicators used to measure economic development in the analyzed literature.This should make it easier for practitioners and researchers alike to make sense of their local economies' conditions, regardless of how they choose to approach the question of economic development.
We condensed the different metrics of economic development in the disciplinary literature of public administration and economic development to thematic categories of the articles' subject outcomes and targeted improvements.Through examining the distribution of these categories across the articles and across the macro-categories we grouped them into, the timing of the articles by classification, we can identify sub-topics and metrics of economic development that have been well-covered by the journals included in the analysis as well as aspects of economic development that have not been well-studied.We can see that Outcomes and Tools of economic development are the major thematic macro-categories in the literature, with less attention being placed on the Antecedents of economic development.Likewise, there is less attention in the literature to articles that focuses on making Physical/Tangible improvements compared to those that focus on Social/Intangible improvements, suggesting that, even though, both macro-categories are important and studied in the literature, there is much focus and interest on Social/Intangible improvements, at least in more recent years.In addition, we presented a selection of economic development indicators, and indexes used in the article identified in the literature review.Some indicators and indexes used in the articles in our corpus seem to be more refined and better constructed than others, but our assessment of these indicators and indexes is overall positive as it seems they both display both construct and face validity and can be considered good indicators based on identified criteria in the literature (see, for example, Hatry, 2006;Poister et al., 2015;Van Dooren et al., 2015).
We also can see how the subject matter of economic development has expanded its scope since the late-20th century, as well as how some themes and improvements remain constantly relevant over time.Finance is one of those themes that consistently appears to be relevant over time, along with the comprehensive approach to understanding economic development, along with an orientation to Sustainability.However, the variety of the themes and improvements that were discussed in the articles increased with each decade, along with the overall number of articles that fit our selection criteria.
We especially note that the public sector in economic development frequently dominates as a theme and topic of improvement in the top journals of public administration and development across time periods and places.This is likely because we selected from the development and public administration literatures, which would limit the perspective from the for-profit private sector in economic development practice.It is not clear from our current data if adding articles from the business literature would have contributed much to the analysis, since businessoriented literature is more concerned with the individual firms and not the larger economic environment in which the firms operate that economic development focuses more specifically on.

Conclusion
Before we begin the conclusion, we would like to call attention to the fact that the definitions of economic development that are used can have significant effects on peoples' lives.Economic development can be defined in many ways by many different people with competing interests and perspectives that are mutually exclusive.Some commonalities across the articles include a common interest in producing more desirable outcomes in our experienced world and a focus on material conditions within a social context.However, there is no true single definition of economic development in either the concepts or the measurements.Any single measurement, theory, or definition of economic development anyone may be able to produce would only really be one facet of economic development among dozens of others.Therefore, economic development as a topic can only be studied when it is broken down into combinations of conceptual parts.We observed this when we read studies on the politics behind the policies, developing businesses and business processes, improving quality of life indicators, and the organizations that undertake the processes of economic development.
There are several ways to conceptualize and study economic development that are relevant facets of economic development processes and outcomes.
For researchers, studying economic development is simply a matter of defining one's research questions appropriately and using the appropriate methodology to answer the questions, a well understood and accepted concept.But for applied practitioners of economic development, the diversity of meanings behind economic development must be considered and clarified as a matter of public policy.Economic development measurements must be considered sound and relevant from both the perspective of the governments making the policy and the stakeholders whom the policies affect.This is not a trivial problem with obvious or easy solutions.As we have observed, economic development can mean different things to different people and interest groups, and consequently can be measured with a variety of indicators and indexes.Which definition gets selected and used by the private and public sectors can be seen as a matter of political competition among stakeholders and within the society itself.How a society defines economic development and what criteria get selected for use in economic development can affect how well the population lives independently of the policymakers' intended outcomes.If a political faction can identify and maintain the most democratically desirable and ecologically sustainable economic conditions that are possible, for as many people as possible, we may be able to intentionally improve conditions for the whole population despite the limitations that naturally exist for us.
Another major takeaway that comes from this research is the inextricably interconnected nature of economic development's different strains of thinking.Each theme should not be thought of as an independent and separate concept.Instead, antecedents of economic development (i.e., finance, politics, and economic development theory) as well as economic development tools (i.e., planning, housing, transportation, PPPs, etc.) are all aspects that could (and should) be integrated with the others to produce the desired outcomes of economic development (i.e., change in society, sustainability, health, etc.).Likewise, the improvements are more than single goals in isolation of each other.Instead, they can frame the process and practice of economic development in combinations with each other to operationalize research and praxis more effectively.Even the themes and improvements with fewer papers should be further explored and integrated into the conceptualization of economic development.This is because economic development itself is, apparently, really a composite of the interactions among each of the themes and improvement goals in dynamic social action arenas (Ostrom, 2005).
On A further recommendation that follows the defining of the research topic is to be aware of how measurements that are used fit with the research topic and practicing officials' goals.It is, in fact, worth the effort to develop appropriate custom measurements based on what researchers are studying and stakeholders find relevant.A variation of GDP is a ubiquitous way to define an economy and its development in the literature.However, it cannot be used as a shorthand variable for general economic development, as it only measures the estimated value of all economic activity in a geographically bounded population.Other relevant questions for both the researcher and practitioner include but are not limited to, the social and ecological sustainability of a project or policy, the democratic will and desire of most people living in a society, and what happens to wealth once it is produced in a local place need to be expressed in more specific terms than the blunt measurements used when computing technology and data were not as available and accessible.GDP is too simple of a measurement that does not capture the nuances of the social and material factors that make economic development possible.
Poverty is another example of a popular metric that may be accidentally overused, as how poverty is defined can affect how and what is measured.In the U.S., poverty is defined by being below or within range of an income threshold.It does not account for other forms of deprivation and exclusion (such as race, gender, sexuality, class, and disability status) that can, under certain socially made circumstances, be made to hinder economic activity among the excluded and for the greater social whole.Failing to account for the social roots of poverty by using an income-threshold measurement can skew results of research and suggest policy regimes that will more likely have an incomplete effect on the problem.Instead, researchers can be more creative and choose metrics that get at precisely what they are attempting to study but are not currently popular in the literature to at least see if better outcomes can be achieved.
The field of economic development is broad enough to accommodate a diversity of metrics that have their time and place in the world of research; the only constraints are the appropriateness and accessibility of the data to answer the questions.
However, this is different for practitioners.People who do economic development work must be more attentive to the needs and interests of their home constituencies.The definitions of economic development practitioners use can change over time with the changing circumstances of their territorial jurisdictions and the people who live within them.However, the stakes are significantly higher for practitioners to get those definitions correctly tailored for their communities under various circumstances.Peoples' material well-being and future health is on the line with practitioners' work, so the margin for error in logic, perception, and practice is reduced.
Before concluding this article, the limitations of this review of the literature must be addressed here.The focus on two subject areas-development and public administration-may have prevented the inclusion of relevant articles in our sample thus potentially leading to selection bias issues.Future studies should start from a comprehensive search through a variety of databases and find a narrow list of studies to review, particularly considering their relevance to the topic(s) of review.In addition, future studies, in order to better conceptualize and measure economic development, should involve economic development practitioners in their research.One such way would be to conduct interviews or focus groups with them, drawing implications for real-world economic development policy.Alternatively studying state and local economic development initiatives and/or economic development organizations may provide valuable insights as to how economic development is defined and measured.
Economic development is a diverse and growing field of empirical research.Which specific methods are used is not as important a question, as is the matching of research questions to the methods that are used.The common orientation of economic development towards improving material conditions in human societies can be used to distinguish between policies and ideas that work and those that do not work as well or at all.Provided the methods are valid for the research questions, due diligence is done with the data, and there is a sustained, authoritative will from enough people to do so, it may be possible to empirically solve material challenges experienced at the social level.
29 publications between 2006 and 2010.A rapid increase in the interest of researchers is apparent from 2010, with 65 articles published between 2011 and 2015 and 233 articles published between 2016 and 2020.One possible explanation of this peak in the 2011-2020 decade is the resources allocated to scientific research by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5), passed by Congress and the Obama Administration to lead the country through the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.

Table 1 .
Coding Theme Type, Definition, Theme Keywords Used, and Article Count

Table 2 .
Coding Improvement Type, Definitions, Improvement Keywords Used, and Article Count

Table 3 .
Type of Method Category, Keywords Used, and Count of Articles by Methodology Category Causal; Correlational; Descriptive; Experimental; Logit; OLS; Panel Data; Probit; Quasi-Experimental; Regress*; Time-Series/Time Series 165 Theoretical Studies that rely on or expand upon theories in the field to answer their research questions.Analysis; Confirmed Theory; Logic*; Model*; Phenomen*; Principle; Theor*; Theory Building 83 N/A 8

Table 4 .
List of Peer-Reviewed Journals and Article Counts and (N=34) articles on Transportation.Finally, the remaining 85 articles were classified as Antecedents of economic development, (N=54) of them focusing on the raising of financial capital or financial markets for business development (Finance), (N=22) of them studying how the political discourse and opinions may influence economic development (Politics), and

Table B
in the Appendix shows the distribution of articles by their improvement sub-category assignment over time.In the 1986-1990 period, the article's subject worked to improve the Public Sector/Formal Institutions sub-category (N=2).The remaining sub-categories in the 1980s were Physical Infrastructure Supports and Productivity with (N=1) article each.In the first half of the 1990s, the emphasis was again on Public Sector/Formal Institutions subcategory (N=4), and Productivity (N=2).The Public Sector/Formal Institutions and Productivity sub-categories were tied in third place (N=4) in the second half of the 1990s, preceded by Physical Infrastructure Support (N=6) and Environmental (N=5).In the first half of the 2000s, the emphasis was again on Public Sector/Formal Institutions and Productivity sub-categories (N=6), followed by Physical Infrastructure Support (N=5) and Social Infrastructure Support (N=4).A similar partition also applies to the second half of the 2000s.In the first half of the 2010s, the Public Sector/Formal Institutions sub-category shot up with 24 articles.It is joined by Public Innovation and Research and Social Infrastructure both tied with 11 articles, and Generic Wealth Improvement (N=11) sub-categories as the top three subcategories for the decade.The 2016-2020 interval saw once again the Public Sector/Formal . In the theme Poverty, which discusses poverty and issues related to poverty, economic development has been measured, among the others, with these indicators 'non-monetary village saving' byMusinguzi (2016)and with 'probability of borrowing' and 'amount borrowed' in Twine et al. (2019).Economic development in the theme Sustainability, which specifically discusses issues of defining and maintaining economic development reliably over time, has been measured, for example, by using a series of livability indicators in Danielaini (2018) and biodiversity indicators in Gauselmann and Marek (2012).Finally, in the theme Transportation, which discusses transportation, problems related to transportation, and transit provision, economic development has been measured, among the others, with these indicators 'firm growth' and 'foreign trade volume' in Ying et al. (2017).
the other hand, practitioners must account for the different definitions of economic development that are used by different stakeholders in the broader society.If a common definition of economic development does not technically exist, it is impossible to tell what kinds of work practitioners should do, or if their labor is productive.Practitioners need to have a definition of economic development to do their work effectively, but also cannot ever have one that is objectively true and universally applicable.For practical purposes, people who work in economic development may consult with communities and stakeholders to find what is relevant and wanted by the stakeholders of the communities they are working with.Some common measurements may emerge that practitioners can use from these discussions, but they could not be considered objective or universally applicable measurements.By allowing conversations at the local level to steer the definitions that are practically used by businesses and governments, we may get something more valuable and useful than a universal academic theory of economic development: A plurality of democratically negotiated local visions for how life is and could be intentionally worked towards and maintained for people.

Table B .
Counts of Improvement Sub-Categories by 5-Year Interval