Economy Online: Researching Your Regional Economy on the Web

 
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f you read the business pages you might think the dot.com revolution is dot.gone. That’s not true. If you are a researcher or information junkie, for you, the revolution has just begun. Information, data, research, statistics and more are no longer the private reserve of scholars willing to plow through university libraries and government archives. They are at your fingertips.

What does it take to access and use all these newly liberated resources? Are these accessible and usable by the general public? Do you have to be a PhD to understand them? Not according to Joe Cortright, a well known economic development researcher and coauthor of www.EconData.Net, one of the most popular economic research sites on the world wide web.

WAI invited Joe to share his thoughts at the 2001 national conference. The following summary is drawn from his humorous and insightful presentation.  Continued

Economic research is an invaluable tool for understanding your local community, building coalitions, and developing strategy. It has been a building block of the most successful high road sector strategies and partnerships. Over the past three years WAI has sponsored research workshops at the national conference to encourage the development of sector initiatives. This year one of the workshops took a look at the wide world of data on the web.

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