CASE STUDY

State Economic Development Agency

State Economic Development Agency

Introduction

State legislature established the State Economic Development Agency (SEDA) in order to foster economic development in the state by supporting the industry existing in the state, by developing new business enterprises and by attracting new industries to the state. However, it was said by David Prince who was the director of SEDA that assessing economic health of the state was not an easy task. Moreover, assistance cannot be provided to enhance economic development because no one knew about the businesses that existed, their locations and what they were producing. Therefore, the idea of the development of State Enterprise Database was introduced by Prince. This would contain data that would be helpful to the bodies interested in economic development. For this purpose, contract was signed with State University Center for Business and Economic Research in order to survey the development that took place in SED (PNN Online, 2009).

Definition of Issues

The project was started in 1990, and the economic developers were asked how they would use the data. Therefore, it was found that the economic developer wanted detailed data along with the location of the businesses that existed in the state. The names and address of the businesses that had employed more than eight employees were required and other details such as commodities offered by them and sales data. This shows that a massive project was started because of which the project was restricted initially to Washington only since it had 1800 businesses alone.

Analysis of Case Data and Critical Evaluation

Since it was not a sensible idea to collect information from the businesses directly, they started looking for sources that already had the required data. Financial data of the businesses are collected by the Internal Revenue Service, but data was highly restricted by law. The chambers of comers in the state were few which included Department of Commerce, Revenue and Employment Security Department also such businesses such as Dun and Bradstreet.

When investigation was being conducted, it was revealed that most of the data required by them was with state Employment Security Department. Therefore, a senior systems analyst was assigned the task to determine the data that was collected by Employment Security and how information with regards to businesses in Washington could be collected.

Monopolistic Competition

In this case, the business development in the economy has been discussed. However, where there is business development, there is also monopolistic competition. This means that there are many producers who sell differentiated products, and it is a form of imperfect competition. However, there are certain circumstances in which monopolistic competition can be advantageous or detrimental to the customers (Maunder, 1995).

However, monopolistic competition brings a loss to productive efficiency because of which the customers has to pay more and buy less than he can when perfect competition exists in the economy. However, since the products are differentiated, diversity is provided to the customers, but some wastage can be present in use of non price competition. In the long run, other firms might enter ...