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Virginia Is for Business

Selling the Commonwealth in the Global Competition Era

Acadia University

According to business pundits of the 1990s, the United States had finally liberated itself from the shackles of an Old Economy. Technology, entrepreneurialism, and the reduction of social regulations promised to restore American economic competitiveness. Nowhere else in the United States did this ideology achieve greater legitimacy than in the American South, where traditional southern conservatism merged with corporate neoliberalism to produce a potent ideological compound. Despite the enthusiasm for the New Economy, the driving force of public policy in the region had a decidedly Old Economy tack to it. At the center of economic development strategy was the willingness to use huge subsidies to lure mobile corporations to invest. The corporate subsidies program reflected the key assumptions of the New Economy ideology. Despite the overheated claims, the strategy failed to deliver freedom or prosperity to southern workers.

Key Words: economic development • Virginia politics • New Economy • southern politics • southern economic history • George Allen • neoliberalism

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