The diversity of disciplines participating in regional science have helped make it one of the most interesting and fruitful fields of academic specialization, but it has also made it difficult to fit the many perspectives into a curriculum for an academic major. It is even difficult for authors to write regional science textbooks, since what is elementary knowledge for one discipline might be entirely novel for another. Part of the movement was, and continues to be, associated with the political and economic realities of the role of the local community. On any occasion where public policy is directed at the sub-national level, such as a city or group of counties, the methods of regional science can prove useful. Traditionally, regional science has provided policymakers with guidance on the following issues:  By targeting federal resources to specific geographic areas the Kennedy administration realized that political favors could be bought. This is also evident in Europe and other places where local economic areas do not coincide with political boundaries. In the more current era of devolution knowledge about "local solutions to local problems" has driven much of the interest in regional science. Thus, there has been much political impetus to the growth of the discipline. Regional science has enjoyed mixed fortunes since the 1980s. While it has gained a larger following among economists and public policy practitioners, the discipline has fallen out of favor among more radical and post-modernist geographers. In an apparent effort to secure a larger share of research funds, geographers had the National Science Foundation's Geography and Regional Science Program renamed "Geography and Spatial Sciences". In 1991, Paul Krugman, as a highly regarded international trade theorist, put out a call for economists to pay more attention to economic geography in a book entitled "Geography and Trade", focusing largely on the core regional science concept of agglomeration economies. Krugman's call renewed interest by economists in regional science and, perhaps more importantly, founded what some term the "new economic geography", which enjoys much common ground with regional science. Broadly trained "new economic geographers" combine quantitative work with other research techniques, for example at the London School of Economics. The unification of Europe and the increased internationalization of the world's economic, social, and political realms has further induced interest in the study of regional, as opposed to national, phenomena. The new economic geography appears to have garnered more interest in Europe than in America where amenities, notably climate, have been found to better predict human location and re-location patterns, as emphasized in recent work by Mark Partridge. In 2008 Krugman won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences and his Prize Lecture has references both to work in regional science's location theory as well as economic's trade theory.