rural

The report outlines how Indianas State Department of Agriculture will transform to meet the needs of the 21st Century. The planning team identified seven key strategies, outlined specific actions to achieve each of them and establised key metrics to gauge progress.

The paper discusses the different models related to ICT in Indian agriculture including Kisan call centers, The Gyandoot project, Bhoomi project, Village knowledge centers, and AGMARKNET.

The study identifies policy and program steps that can be taken to enable economic growth in rural areas of the U.S. According to the report, there must be a shift in focus to assets and opportunities for rural America to prosper.

The article from the Main Street Economist states that the rural economy broke free from the reins of recession in 2004 with an especially strong performance in the farm sector. Net farm income easily surpassed the record high of 2003. The weakness that plagued the nonfarm rural economy in recent years appears to have been replaced with stronger job growth and higher incomes.

The first phase of this project sought to understand Indiana’s ag economy – its strengths, weaknesses, unique opportunities and threats. The second phase of this project aimed to develop specific actions to build on Indiana’s strengths and shore up weaknesses, all with the objective of maintaining and expanding the job base.

The paper illustrates that choice of Beale code can alter conclusions regarding the relative speed of rural and urban growth across a variety of commonly used social and economic indicators.

The authors contend that current policies to improve the disappointing economic performance of rural regions are, by and large, not working. The United States does, however, have the need and the opportunity to lead in this field.

This paper argues that regional public goods in developing countries are under-funded despite their potentially high rates of return compared to traditional country-focused investments. In Africa the under-funding of regional public goods is primarily a political and institutional challenge to be met by the countries in this region. But the donor community ought to consider the opportunity cost of its relative neglect, and explore changes in the aid architecture that would encourage more attention to regional goods.

The paper addresses policy research on African agriculture, which is long on prescriptions for what needs to be done to spur agricultural growth but short on how such prescriptions might be implemented in practice.

In this report, the GAO examines the amount of wind power generation in relation to all U.S. electricity generation and the prospects for wind powers growth; the contribution of wind power generation to farmers income and to the economic well-being of rural communities in the 10 states with the highest wind power generation capacity; and the advantages and disadvantages for farmers of owning a wind power project versus leasing their land to a commercial wind power developer.