Place-based policy is both ubiquitous and widely criticized. The conventional economic case against place-targeted interventions is strong, relegating its application to a narrow range of cases where labor resources are immobile and/or in the presence of externalities. However, both globally and within nations, equity considerations lead to policies and programs for disadvantaged regions and/or the populations in those regions. In another dimension, the challenges of declining rural areas in North America or Europe may also be fundamentally different from the options to be considered in developing countries that are at a very different point along the development path. We propose a possible means of making choosing places for place-based policies, using the examples of Canada, Chile and Peru.