The 2019 bushfires, pandemic and series of flood events has illustrated starkly, the critical role of having economic developers on the ground, ensuring money is flowing in the local economy as quickly as possible. With its National Education Program( recently recognised for CRL by Curtin University) and its Australian Certified Economic Developer Program( ACEcD), EDA is the national leader in economic recovery and resilience training.
The pandemic and its aftermath highlighted the vulnerability and also the importance of global value chains and the impact disruptions can have to local economies. As the organisation representing local economic developers across the nation, EDA is the ideal partner to ensure the strategic objectives of the Government’ s Future Made in Australia policy successfully insulate local economies from future global impacts. 3
HARNESSING DATA AND DIGITAL TECHNOLOGY Australia’ s Economic Development, competitiveness and productivity relies on proactively and urgently understanding and leveraging emerging and disruptive technologies at a place-based level.
Exponential change in local economies is already happening due to decarbonisation, AI, disruption of the financial sector, demographic shifts, etc. Communities risk losing their comparative advantages if a status quo approach is applied to economic development.
As the national peak body, EDA is building capacity, to ensure the economic development sector understands the opportunities and threats of the growing virtual economy for place-based community wellbeing and prosperity. Emerging and disruptive technology and innovation can boost productivity, community wealth building and resilience and EDA is leading efforts to ensure our cities and regions are poised to embrace and leverage this rapidly changing space. The Australian Government has an opportunity to boost productivity by supporting EDA’ s training and education efforts.
IMPROVED EVALUATION AND IMPACT MEASUREMENT OF ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT As the Government develops new programs seeking to boost Australia’ s productivity, all economic development activities should be framed within a theory of change to understand impact and efficacy.
Input and output data needs to be collected at a regional level, to measure the impact of economic development activities undertaken by all levels of government. This will support improved baseline assessment, target setting and analysis of the outcomes of economic development activities to assess whether they were the right ones to deliver community outcomes and whether they were delivered effectively and efficiently.
Globally, economic development activities are orientated towards sustainable, equitable and place-based economic development outcomes, the outcomes of which require consideration of different targets and metrics.
EDA welcomes the opportunity to partner with the Australian Government to boost evaluation capability within the economic development sector to strengthen monitoring and evaluation and ensure that both internal and external reporting on outcomes and impact are transparent and readily available.
This additional capability will also build internal and external support for place based economic development activity and contribute to stronger community support and social licence.
SUMMARY Economic Development Australia( EDA) commends Prime Minister Albanese and Treasurer Chalmers for their ambitious approach to reimagining Australia’ s policy settings in order to boost productivity.
We are presented with a generational opportunity to build economic complexity and resilience in order to meet the complex challenges of climate change and the shifting international economic and political landscape. Economic Development Australia represents the professional sector at the heart of the productivity solution.
We welcome the opportunity to support the Government to unlock the Power of Place in order to achieve its global economic ambitions for local economic impact.
REFERENCES
1. EDA’ s Economic Development Sector Report 2. www. actoninstitute. au
3. Dr Christian Ketels: Industrial Policy Reloaded( April 2024)
ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT JOURNAL VOL 18 NO 2 2025 11