The centrepiece to ‘economic multiplier’ planning comes down, in practical
effect, to ‘employment multiplier’ outcomes, emergent as the generation of gainful
regional income relative to expenditure within a formal income–expenditure con-
struct. Offset against the job losses resulting, for example, from replacing tele-
phone operators with digitized exchanges, are the ‘employment multiplier’
benefits of employee-intensive activities, especially those achieved at modest rates
of plant capitalization per job place created. The longer-term economic multiplier
benefits – often of a residentiary kind – are frequently of greater overall worth to
a region than the first-flush fiscal gains from once-off resource exploitation.
A problem with contemporary growth pattern management is adherence to the
determinism linked into rationally comprehensive planning. Computer technol-
ogy helps to store, retrieve, select, and compare factually accurate data, but can
do little to help the regional growth pattern practitioner to think, reason, form
wise judgements and consider wider alternatives. The ‘enrichment of variety’
approach implicates diverse production and welfare options, along with the
enhancement of lifestyle variety, although it is often impractical to quantify. Either
consciously or subconsciously, the regional multiplier specialist is ranging his or
her mind over alternative options and considerations all the time, working within
a conservation withdevelopment lattice.In interim summary for this introduction to multiplier principles, growth
pattern management can be reduced to a prime essential: promotion of socio-
environmentally acceptable growth-based employment along the expansionist
exportlines depicted earlier in the multiplier spiral for development (figure 4.1).
A growth pattern planning service, motivated by enlightened self-interest,
can deliver ‘positive’ outcomes – the procedural steps depicted in the figure 2.6
planning sequence (chapter 2) and the figure 4.1 development spiral (this chapter).
Moving on: the production of policy plans and projects at the regional
level involves rather more, operationally, than is indicated with these two
constructs.Growth Pattern Information Needs
The previous section in this chapter profiled the ‘development multiplier spiral’
and revisited the ‘planning progression’, while the passage previous to that delin-
eated the ‘policy markers’. These reflect the qualitativecharacteristics of macro
growth pattern (regional) planning. The practical part of that endeavour, regional
development and conservancy, is quantitative.
At the heart of every project endeavour lies a quantification of data and a
data analysis work unit, surely? In practical fact this is rare, most instances of
non-metropolitan planning output being more like an intermediate level of
government advisory service, and a fiscal conduit for central and local govern-
ment contributions. The fiscal-administrative approach has of necessity,
driven by inefficient resource exploitation, created an extractive approach to
federal handouts in poor regions, an evasive approach to waste disposal in124 Practice