Determining factors for local economic development: the perception of practitioners in the north west and eastern regions of the UK

This paper aims to investigate how policy makers perceive the importance of different factors in the process of local economic development (LED) in two UK regions with very contrasting socioeconomic experiences. the paper starts off with a review of a wide range of academic and policy-oriented studies to identify a list of key generic factors which are thought to be crucial to LED. This check list of LED factors provides a basis for the wubsequent empirical study. A questionnair survey was sent to local actors in the two regions to assign rankings to these factors. This was then followed yup by 22 in-depth, semi-structed interviews with selective participants.