Economic Development Alliances Fred Young Phillips Alliant International University, USA Maastricht School of Management, The Netherlands E INTRODUCTION AND HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE Metropolitan and rural regions around the world com- pete to attract enterprises (private companies, NGOs, parastatals, and government agencies) that offer well- paying jobs. Economic globalization and new tech- nologies make necessary, and at the same time make possible, new strategies for economic development (ED). Increasingly, these new strategies involve intra- regional and inter-regional alliances. Three forces create the context for these alli- ances: 1. Information and communication technologies (ICT) make all modern strategic alliances pos- sible. ICT facilitates the continuous and intense As is fitting for responses to a complex problem, ED alliances take many forms, defined by their initiating agencies, memberships, objectives, funding, and lines of authority or communication. This article sets forth a taxonomy of these alliances, with examples of each type of initiative. The several kinds of public-private partnerships are categorized. A reference list enables readers to pursue more details about the various kinds of initiatives. BACKGROUND Economic Development Blakely and Bradshaw (2002) define economic de- velopment as "a process in which local governments