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Spatial Relocation as an Instrument of Social Policy
Abstract
Many policy interventions focus on people, but place can be equally important. While some policies – for example, income tax rebates or differential local levies – are on the face nonspatial, we know that geography matters and that any policy intervention can sometimes have unexpected policy outcomes. This is only one of the difficulties of using policy instruments to make significant societal changes, because, as Tiebout demonstrated more than half a century ago, people vote with their feet, and in a democracy it is not possible to control where they will go. I explore these issues with mostly US data on school busing, mobility experiments for poor households, and neighborhood interventions for racial mixing. The discussion will raise the fundamental issue of whether we invest more heavily in people, or more heavily in places.
Citation
Clark, William A. V. 2008. "Spatial Relocation as an Instrument of Social Policy," Motu Public Policy Seminar, July.
Motu code: WPS0807
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