It's really two different questions. #1 How do you create incentives to locate profitable businesses in economically depressed areas? #2 How do you create compe

It's really two different questions. #1 How do you create incentives to locate profitable businesses in economically depressed areas? #2 How do you create competitive global businesses? The latter question is really a more complicated valuation of possible end state, current global market state and opportunities, and how much capital the nation is prepared to invest. South Korea and Japan (and SE Asia) would be modern examples. The former question is a bit simpler, because all the levers are in national government hands (or proxies for those levers). Although it's a process that still takes time, as businesses organically form, relocate, and scale in light of the new local maximum, and economies of colocation organize. If asked to pick, I'd say the biggest modern inputs that can be influenced by the government would be: temporary tax incentives, capital access at competitive rates, access to sufficient local supply of trained and knowledgeable labor, low carbon / cheap power, global network access at reasonable rates (or at least sufficient capacity to nearest backbone), and local upstream suppliers (or room for same).