Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency

Your task for this assignment is to investigate a federal and/or provincial government policy or policy option, or an economic issue affecting regions or urban areas. The text of your written report should be 7-10 typed, double-spaced pages in length, not counting tables and figures, if any (see Format below for further details). Like the other assignments, this assignment is a team effort, for teams of two students each.

Content of Report ：

Your report should use relevant economic analysis to address the issue that you have chosen to study. When making policy recommendations, be sure that they respect practical and 2 constitutional constraints. I encourage you to include tables or figures that present data relevant to your topic.

Note that a useful resource for locating economic research on a particular topic is the EconLit database. Canadian Public Policy and the Canadian Journal of Regional Science, among other journals, may contain articles relevant to the topics suggested below.

Format of Report ：

Your written report should be in essay form, with subsections if you think they would improve the organization. Each report should consist of 7-10 double-spaced pages of text, accompanied by tables or graphs as you see fit. Pages should be numbered. To simplify editing, tables and graphs can be placed at the end of the text, but be sure to explicitly refer to all included tables and graphs in the text regardless of where they are placed in the document. (In other words, all tables and graphs should be numbered so that you can refer to them easily.) Use a 12-point font, and 1 inch (2.54 cm) margins on the top, bottom and sides of each page of text. Please include a title page (note that the title page does not count as a page of text). Abstracts, executive summaries, and tables of contents are not necessary for a report that is this short. The first page of text of your report should be numbered 1. Finally, all references and data sources must be fully listed following the Chicago style of referencing. Entries in the list of references should be single-spaced, with a blank line between each entry. The Author-Date style is the format most used by economists, so it is the one that I recommend. Here is a link to an online guide to the Chicago style: https://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/tools_citationguide.html.

Please note that you are welcome to pursue some other topic related to a regional or urban economic issue, as long as you clear it with me first. Alternative topics could deal with a country other than Canada.

1. Today, the federal government funds six regional development agencies. Pick one of these agencies and discuss its mandate, the economic rationale for its activity, and how the agency has evolved over time. Evaluate as best you can the activities of the agency, in light of what you have learned in this course. Do you think the agency is having a positive effect on regional development? Why or why not?

The six agencies are:

1. Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency
2. Western Economic Diversification Canada
3. Federal Economic Development Initiative for Northern Ontario
4. Canada Economic Development for Quebec Regions
5. Federal Economic Development Agency for Ontario
6. Canadian Northern Economic Development Agency