Several years ago I gave a major speech on regional development programs in Canada and went into a lot of the literature about what people have found around the world with them. There was a comment made by the World Bank that just about every regional development program that was ever tried didn't work, in the sense of really doing anything.
But there were two things I found that were quite effective in trying to improve more depressed regions. One of them was to link them better with the urban areas in terms of both communication and transportation networks. That allowed people more easily to trade from the outlying regions with the major urban centres. It was found in Europe and in a number of other studies that these things did tend to work.
The other type of regional development effort that was successful was getting over jurisdictional boundaries, and in particular, when you get to smaller regions, enabling a sharing of the costs of major expenditures by getting several communities to share the costs rather than each, let's say, building their own centres. If you could get some economies of scale and efficiencies that way, that actually succeeded.
I was quite surprised that one of the jurisdictions was a Canadian jurisdiction that actually put some significant effort in that direction. That was Alberta. With its regional development policies, it was trying to get smaller towns to share resources more, so that they could have better facilities available to them.
None of these things is on the tax side, and so I think maybe we have to go back to trying to recognize what we are trying to achieve and how best to achieve it. I think those are interesting directions to think about anyway.