rural

The authors argue that rural regions in the US require competitiveness strategies to encourage entrepreneurism and innovation. Though capital and a willingness to start new businesses are often available, rural regions lack the support system to help new ventures stay afloat.

This paper is divided into two parts. The first part sets out a conceptual framework for diagnostic assessments of agricultural innovation capacity. It explains that contemporary patterns of agricultural development demand fresh thinking on how innovation can be promoted in ways that can deal with rapidly evolving production and market conditions. The second part of the paper provides guidance on how the principles of this conceptual framework can be used in diagnostic assessments.

Despite continued high energy prices, the Food and Agricultural Policy Research Institute (FAPRI) expects world economic growth to remain strong in the coming decade, at around 3 percent per annum, boosting consumption of vegetable oil, dairy products, and meat in many parts of the world. FAPRI also reports that new policy developments and rising interest in renewable fuels due to high fossil energy costs are expected to boost ethanol and biodiesel markets in the United States, European Union, and Asia.

The report identifies 86 federal programs in 10 federal agencies and 3 regional commissions and authorities that provide economic development funding. Findings indicate that in 2002-2004, the programs provided approximately $200 billion in total economic development funding, about $150 billion of which could be tracked to the county level or below.

In this brief, the authors suggest five areas for action to put rural India on a higher growth trajectory that would cut hunger, malnutrition, and unemployment at a much faster pace than has been the case so far. The authors emphasize investments with a human face that include and reach out to the rural poor and a reorientation of subsidies toward such investments.

The classic narrative of economic development -- poor countries are caught in poverty traps, out of which they need a Big Push involving increased aid and investment, leading to a takeoff in per capita income -- has been very influential in development economics since the 1950s. The idea of the takeoff does not garner much support in the data. Takeoffs are rare in the data, most plausibly limited to the Asian success stories. Even then, the takeoffs are not associated with aid and investment as the standard narrative would imply.

This paper ties together the macroeconomic and microeconomic evidence on the competitiveness of African manufacturing sectors. Africa’s difficult business
climate, and the tendency to overcome this by working in ethnic networks, slows new entry and may decrease the incentives of key parts of the business community for creating an aggressive pressure group for reform. This slows their impact and raises the possibility that countries settle into a low-productivity equilibrium.

According to the report, the urgent need today is for a system of technology flows which preserves the incentives for private sector innovation while at the same time meeting the needs of poor farmers in the developing world.

Using results from previous studies in Illinois and Wisconsin, the authors attempt to model the municipal decision of how to provide residents town services. In order to test the applicability of past work to smaller towns, they conducted a survey of the mostly rural state of New Hampshire in the summer of 2004. In addition, they construct decision-making models using logit, probit, and Poisson techniques which examine the influence of population, location and other exogenous factors on the decision to privatize.

This paper describes major external changes to the U.S. public agricultural research system over 1988-1999; describes the reactions of the public agricultural research system to the external changes, specifying the innovations that have occurred over the last decade; and draws conclusions about the present and future performance of the U.S. research system.