رابطه بین کيفيت زندگی و توسعه اقتصادی محلی: یک مطالعه تجربی در مورد حوزه های مقامات محلی در انگلستان

Recent academic literature has increasingly placed more emphasis on the importance of the quality of life factor to local economic development. High environmental quality, culturally desirable working and living conditions, and convenient local amenities are believed to be vital to foster economic growth and job creation by retaining local businesses and attracting inward investment. However, there is another argument that the initial attractiveness of the growing agglomeration economies will soon turn out to suffer from the negative impacts of growth in terms of a deteriorating quality of life. This paper aims to explore empirically the views of policy-makers in two English regions over the contribution of quality of life factors to the process of local economic development. It then uses a set of indicators to examine statistically the relationship between quality of life and other local economic development factors of 363 local authority areas in England.

Both academics and policy-makers have long been interested in finding out the key locational factors affecting investment and economic success. Owing to the failure of traditional economic development factors and neo-classical approaches to capture the large amount of unexplained variation in local growth rates (Doeringer et al, 1987 and Bovaird, 1993), recent research has increasingly turned to seek additional or alternative explanations from soft intangible factors. Quality of life has been strongly advocated as one of the three most important determinants of business location decisions by Schmenner (1982) and Myers (1988). High environmental quality, culturally desirable working and living conditions, and convenient local amenities are believed to be vital to foster economic growth and job creation by retaining local businesses and attracting inward investment (eg Hall et al, 1987, Bosman and de Smidt, 1993 and Johnson and Rasker, 1995). However, the causal relationship between quality of life and the process of local economic development (LED) is a difficult and controversial research area. Although a lot of academic studies suggest that the level of entrepreneurial activity is positively related to the quality of living of an area, the initial attractiveness of the growing agglomeration economies could soon turn out to suffer from negative impacts of growth. The attractiveness of a place will eventually hit critical thresholds, creating stress to the local infrastructure and the natural environment, and lead to a rising cost of living and an overall deterioration in the quality of living (see Myers, 1988). Castells and Hall (1994) have documented such declining quality of living in Silicon Valley after its economic success — negative factors such as heavy traffic congestion, rising levels of pollution from the so-called clean industry and the unaffordable house prices have become a ‘dark side of the chip’. Castells (1989) (p 52) finds the notion of lifestyle subjective and ambiguous and he regards quality of life as a result of the characteristics of the industry (its newness and highly educated workforce) rather than the determinant of its location pattern. He dismisses the quality of life factor as a distinctive feature of high technology complexes since there is no evidence to show that there is economic growth in a vast number of scenic areas in America. The complex notion of the relationship between quality of life and LED forms the central research question of this paper. The very different perspectives from past academic research over such relationship prompt for a need to explore the issues empirically. This paper aims to elicit the views of policy-makers over the contribution of quality of life factors to LED in the North West and Eastern Regions of England. It then uses a set of indicators to examine statistically the relationship between quality of life and other LED factors of 363 local authority areas in England.1

The evidence collected from the survey and the in-depth interviews highlight the fact that quality of life is important to LED provided that the basic traditional factors are already in place. Indeed, quality of life provides the cutting-edge in the competitive process when a number of potential investment locations are on a “level playing field” in terms of traditional factors. However, it is clear that quality of life is more important in shaping the reproduction space of an area than the production space. The statistical analysis using 29 indicators on different LED factors for local authority areas in England tends to lend some preliminary support to this argument. Quality of life alone can provide a very desirable living environment, as confirmed by the spatial patterns shown by the third principal component. Equally, one can argue that just having hard infrastructure and the traditional factors will only create a commuting culture for outside workforce to take up high quality jobs, as currently evident in some British cities. However, it is the combination of quality of life and traditional factors such as land, quality workforce, infrastructure and accessible locations which create the most successful economies which are characteristic of the English home counties. The discussion in this paper thus highlights the importance of both traditional factors and quality of life factors in integrating production and reproduction space. However, the key message is that academics should not over-boast the importance of quality of life factors and ignore the more basic locational factors in the development process. One may argue that the traditional locational factors are still the necessary conditions, whilst the softer quality of life factors provide the additional, optimal conditions for economic success. The analysis presented here is exploratory in nature and by no means establishes the causal relationship between quality of life and economic success, which will require further refinement and analysis.