Initial impacts of community economic development initiatives in the Yorkshire and Humber structural funds programme

This paper presents the evidence of the initial beneficial effects of Community Economic Development (CED) initiatives in Yorkshire and the Humber. The evidence is drawn from survey work undertaken as part of the formal evaluation of the region's 1994-99 Structural Funds Objective 2 programme. Previous research on CED has tended to focus on longer-term benefits. This paper, however, concentrates on the neglected issue of the immediate economic impacts of CED. These will eventually be superseded by capacity building and community linking effects. In the meanwhile, however, given the very recent (late 1994) insertion of CED into Structural Funds programmes in the UK, they represent the principal existing quantifiable impacts. The paper shows that the preliminary impacts are not only important in their own right, but also have implications for the effective longer-term targeting of CED on its designated communities.