UMass Donahue Institute

The Massachusetts Regional Benchmarking Project is designed to provide regional economic development stakeholders in Massachusetts with a set of indicators tailored to reveal regional progress toward the achievement of locally-established economic development goals. The Regional Benchmarking Project, funded in part through a grant by the U.S. Economic Development Administration, is the result of collaboration between the UMass Donahue Institute, the Center for Industrial Competitiveness at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell, and the input of UMass faculty located on campuses throughout the state.

The regional benchmarking indicators should prove useful to municipal officials, planners and regional stakeholders as they seek to evaluate their progress implementing priority projects in economic development districts. The indicators include measures of economic growth, industrial diversification, regional economic development, and regional factors that affect quality of life and opportunity, such as housing costs, personal income, education, and income inequality. The Regional Benchmarking Project supplements its analysis with Technology Audits that document the regional presence of knowledge intensive enterprises. Each project report focuses on one of the seven principal economic regions of the state as defined by MassBenchmarks, the journal of the Massachusetts economy published by the University of Massachusetts in collaboration with the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston (See the appendix entitled “Benchmarks Regions” for detailed regional definitions).