ABSTRACT. The paper examines the debates regarding place-neutral versus place-based policies for economic development. The analysis is set in the context of how development policy thinking on the part of both scholars and international organizations has evolved over several decades. Many of the previously accepted arguments have been called into question by the impacts of globalization and a new response to these issues has emerged, a response both to these global changes and also to nonspatial development approaches. The debates are highlighted in the context of a series of major reports recently published on the topic. The cases of the developing world and the European Union are used as examples of how in this changing context development intervention should increasingly focus on efficiency and social inclusion at the expense of an emphasis on territorial convergence and how strategies should consider economic, social, political, and institutional diversity in order to maximize both the local and the aggregate potential for economic development.

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With the aid of a geographical information system, our paper constructs a three stage least squares simultaneous equation model to inv estigate the interrelationships between the interregional flows of human capital, and the innovation dynamism of a region. In order to do this, we model the interregional migration behaviour of high quality British university graduates from university into first employment, and we relate these human capital flows to both the labour market characteristics and the knowledge characteristics of the employment regions. This is done for both all industries and for just high technology industries. Our results indicate that for England and Wales there is a two-way causality between the interregional human-capital employment-migration flows of recent university graduates and the innovation per formance of regions. However, t he result s for Great Britain as a whole depe nd on whether London is included and Scotland is excluded. We find little or no support that the presence of local universities or small firms promotes regional innovation.

In this paper we employ dichotomous, multinomial and conditional logit models to analyze the employment-migration behavior of some 380,000 U.K. university graduates. By controlling for a range of variables related to human capital acquisition and local economic conditions, we are able to distinguish between different types of sequential migration behavior from domicile to higher education and on to employment. Our findings indicate that U.K. female graduates are generally more migratory than male graduates. We suggest that the explanation for this result lies in the fact that migration can be used as a partial compensation mechanism for gender bias in the labor market. Copyright Blackwell Publishing, Inc. 2007

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This paper provides a critical examination of the widely disseminated view that innovation in all or most activities is favoured by certain common characteristics in the local 'milieu', involving a cluster of many small firms benefiting from flexible inter-firm alliances, supported by mutual information exchanges of both an informal and formal nature. The general applicability of this model, and the localness of crucial linkages, is questioned initially on the basis of a review of different hypotheses about the geography of innovation. Moreover, examination of new survey evidence from a large number of firms in the London conurbation suggests that the importance of specifically local informal information spillovers for successful innovation is very much more limited than has been suggested, as are the supposed advantages of firm smallness.