Brief Summary of Minutes of Annual Meeting

Phil Watson of the University of Idaho was elected to serve as the incoming president and Heather Stephens of West Virginia University was elected incoming secretary.

Each member present gave a station report.

Prior to the meeting Dr. Peggy Brennan communicated with Dr. Betz that there was a need for our project to develop more of a focus where all members were working on a single focused topic. There was a long discussion trying to clarify and respond to the comments and lead to in-depth reflection and fruitful discussions about the project. It was agreed that the comments may be due to the lack of cohesive topics in our proposal. To address that, we may need to emphasize common topics like rural prosperity or health care.

There was significant concern about expressed about how to continue the decades-long history of this group forming smaller, more flexible collaborations in order to address the specific issues facing the constituencies in each of our states. We are very few in numbers—only one or two in each state—and our research is expected to have a local focus. This project breaks our isolation. We have purposefully tried to be flexible to allow collaborative work to evolve naturally through our group meetings based on which states are facing common issues. Many of the research ideas and collaborations would not have occurred without this more flexible form of arrangement. Such flexibility also reflects the multi-faceted nature of the challenges rural American communities face. The challenges for rural American communities are diverse in nature and are heterogeneous both in space and over time. Take the issue of rural prosperity as an example. Even though this is a common theme faced by all participating stations, each state faces very different challenges due to its economic structure and state policy. Even though we approach the same issue of rural prosperity from different local contexts and perspectives, we share the conceptual frameworks and use similar tools. This project creates an opportunity for us to share our knowledge and enables us to learn from each other. 

At the same time we are working on communities, which by definition have many interrelated facets. In the case of communities, an issue, such as the opiod crisis, is multifaceted and focusing on a single aspect of it, such as access to health care, will not solve it. The states reporting on their work on the opioid crisis show this to be true as it appears to be related to different factors in individual states.

Over the years, the group has sponsored many special sessions in SRSA covering diverse and important issues faced by rural America over time. This would not have been possible without the collaborative effort made possible by this project.

This project and its predecessor has gathered people that would not have met each other over the last 30 years or more. It is a great home place to attract junior people and help their career development. Every project member shares his/her personal experience and the connections /collaborative relations established with the help of this project and its predecessor. The Missouri-Wisconsin collaboration began in this project and has resulted in projects on a variety of topics. Med- and early-career participants share their personal experiences on the new connections made and the help/support received along their career development. Such wonderful experiences would not have been in place without the support of this project and its predecessors.

Proposed Solutions

Each of the participant needs to put more emphasis on the collaborative work in the station reports. For instance, if possible, put in a special section devoted to the collaborative efforts.

The impact section of the report could be another place to emphasize our collaboration. As a group, we should try to highlight the news coverages, like Drs. Deller and Low’s coverage in the New York Times, the use of Drs. Goetz and Stephen’s work with Dr. Partridge by the Federal Reserve Bank as well as in the 2019 Economic Report of the President and many other examples.

There is cohesiveness in our work but our reports fail to articulate it well. We might need to provide a one-page flyer to highlight the impact of the work from this group.

In order to better communicate with the funder about the collaborative work inspired by the project, we might need to conduct a network analysis on the paper authorship or citation within the group.

We are sorry that Dr. Brennan could not attend the meeting to participate in the discussion and provide ideas.

Accomplishments

In its 2017 annual meeting, the group identified three primary research areas which link to the priorities set out by REE and the Interagency Task Force on Agricultural and Rural Prosperity around which it wishes to engage in the coming years: 1) Rural Entrepreneurship and Community Well-being; 2) Community Resilience; and 3) Energy and Land Use policies in rural areas. In the past year, the group has made substantial contributions to the academic literature and in disseminating the findings of these studies.

Short term outcomes

It is difficult to quantify short-term measurable benefits our target audience received because the group’s research is centered around how broad economic trends and changes in economic and social policies impact rural areas. Local policy- and decision-makers are the primary consumers of the research produced by this project, but the primary beneficiaries are citizens in the various states our group represents. Because citizens only benefit from our research when local leaders act on the policy recommendations produced by our group, and a wide array of factors influence policy decisions, it makes quantifying results from policy recommendations resulting from our research difficult to quantify.

Outputs

Outputs stemming from our project are much more easily quantifiable. Our team produced over 50 high-quality articles published in the leading journals in the fields of regional science, agricultural economics, resource economics, and community development.

Additionally, the group has produced several unique data sets that have led to some of the publications detailed below. Most notably, Idaho has received a NIFA grant for an open access array of in situ data--trying to make regional science data a public good for researchers to access. The grant is “Tapestry: An Open-Access Multi-Regional Social Accounting System” and is seeking collaborators. The dataset covers county level data commonly used in regional studies such as census data, local public finance data and data on forestry and agriculture and so on. It will allow a completely open access and customization for easy impact assessment (like shift-share analysis and others). Group members have access to many unique, state data sets that they will contribute to the project.

Activities

Members of the group organized collaborations around topics of expertise and relevance to the situations in their particular states. These research teams developed specific research questions, collected and organized data, performed statistical analyses, and presented and published results for studies focused on Rural Entrepreneurship and Community Well-being; Community Resilience; and Energy and Land Use policies in rural areas.

Milestones

We organized an executive committee and have begun to conduct analyses for each objective, with particular focus on producing results that are comparable across the participating states. We have built stronger synergies across rural development scholars. We have conducted outreach activities including input from stakeholders on objectives and results. We have synthesized results across states and across objectives, completed comparative analyses, identified policy implications and, continued outreach activities.

Impacts

In the past year this project has led to several grants being awarded to project members.

1. Preventing opioid misuse and abuse in rural Ohio through enhanced family and community education and training. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Agency. Betz, M. R., Martin, K., Wapner, A., & Julian, D. September 30, 2018-September 30, 2020. ($ 1,080,219).
2. Estimating the Potential Impact of Expanded Healthy Food Incentives Exploring Food System Impacts.  A proposal to the SPUR-facilitated coalition on policy analysis. PI Thilmany, D. with B. Jablonski and A. Bauman. August 2019-December 2020 (projected). $120,000
3. Outreach and Training on New Tools and Resources for Assessing Economic Impact of Local Food Systems (Economic Benchmark Data, Economic Impact Calculator, and New Case Study Material). $27,000. Cooperative Agreement with the USDA-Ag Marketing Service.  October 2018-September 2019. Thilmany, D. with R. Jablonski and P. Watson)
4. Integrating Community and Modeling Efforts to Evaluate Impacts and Tradeoffs of Food System Interventions, lead PI B.B.R. Jablonski. With A. Bonanno, M. Pagliassotti, E. Ryan, L. Bellows, R. Cleary, O. David, R. Boone, M. Carolan, P. Meiman, and J. Quinn. Foundation for Food and Agricultural Research (FFAR), $1,000,000 (FFAR); $1,000,718 (match); $2,000,718 (total)
5. Farm Stress Employee Training and Technical Assistance, USDA Farm Services Agency, $450,000. PI Skidmore, M. Development and delivery of training, resources, and outreach materials that will support Farm Services Agency field employees as they serve farmers and ranchers under stress. 

Activities

The following activities were carried out by the project team over the past year.

Wisconsin continued to investigate the relationship between entrepreneurship and small business. The focus is on the entrepreneurship by women (with Missouri) and minority groups and the difficulties for them to get into the social network necessary for entrepreneurship. Research and extension efforts also covered topics on immigration issues, relationship between health care and workers' productivity, housing (with University of Nebraska-Omaha) and worker shortage in Wisconsin. Working with Economic Development Administration (EDA) university center, they developed a roadshow to communicate research findings to local stakeholders.

Missouri’s collaborative work with Wisconsin and a faculty member at the University of Nebraska-Omaha on the tax and expenditure limitations won the best paper award in the Journal of Public and Non-profit Management. They have submitted another paper looking at whether these limitations increase income inequality and find that they do. Their extension work focused on the 88 3rd-class (lowest assessed property values) rural counties in Missouri that are required to report budgets to the state. They analyzed the government revenue per capita, expenditure per capita and standard fiscal ratio of these counties to investigate tax effort, economy of scale and government performance in general for those counties.

Missouri also collaborated with Wisconsin and Penn State, focusing on the relationship between entrepreneurship and broadband, entrepreneurship and gender, entrepreneurship and ecosystem. Collaborating with Colorado, they explore the role of local foods as a catalyst for  rural manufacturing and employment dynamics and the role of agtourism in the formation of clusters of enterprises. Their work was cited in an article in the New York Times

Colorado investigated the economic dynamics at the farm level. Their work focused on local food systems in Denver, trying to map out the interdisciplinary nature of the local food system that involves social capital, environment and so on. They are collaborating with group members from Oklahoma and Idaho to develop an impact assessment toolkit on local food systems. This work received an AAEA Honorable Mention for the team extension award and communities have produced written reports using the tool kit.

West Virginia worked on various related projects with microdata on death certificates linked to microeconomic and housing data investigating the opioid crisis in West Virginia. They are collaborating with Penn State to are also analyzing the changes in life expectancy across the U.S. They are collaborating with Iowa State conducting research on the motivation for female entrepreneurship. They also worked on examining economic development incentives and their impact on middle class jobs, as part of an Upjohn Institute sponsored project.

Maine, collaborating with Ohio State, received a NIFA funded grant to identify the economic trajectory of forest communities building off of the amenities work of McGranahan (USDA) and Deller (Wisconsin). They worked to develop a set of protocols for the economic contribution of forestry similar to the one referenced by project collaborators at Colorado State for local foods. In another NIFA funded project, they found that community context exposure of the youth (middle and high school students) can change the decision of whether to return to the community.

At Penn State their research covered a wide range of topics, including ag-tourism, wine and beer economics, economic clustering, relationship among entrepreneurship/ecosystem/innovation in rural communities, opioid and life expectancy (with West Virginia), economic mobility (with Oregon State).

Work at Oregon State focused on rural community resilience to federal policy (Northwest Forest Plan) and natural disaster. The research on NWFP shows that protection of old growth forest has attracted more high-skilled occupations in communities close to the protected area. This skill sorting mechanism is the driving force behind the observed increases in population, income and real asset value in nearby communities. Gentrification of the low-skilled occupation, poor households or the in-migration of the elder population are not the driving forces. The research on the impact of natural disaster focuses on community characteristics that contribute to the community economic resilience. We find that social capital enhances the community resilience. Human capital however is not as significant. In some cases, higher human capital can reduce the community resilience to disasters. This is probably because highly educated individuals have higher mobility. Dependence on inter-government transfer reduces resilience.

Ohio State focused on several lines of research related to the goals of NE1749. First, they examined the impact of the local economy on the opioid crisis. They found influence is generally small, but larger for white males and in rural areas. They also investigated how growth in self-employment and wage and salary jobs may differentially impact overall employment growth and the implications for policy makers.

Milestones

We have not set any additional milestones for our project.

Indicators

One indicator of the impact of work from this project is the frequency with which our studies are cited in the national news media. Members from our group had work related to this project cited by the New York Times, The Washington Post, and BBC World Service. Additionally the work on rural-urban interactions from our project in a partnership between Penn State, Ohio State, and West Virginia (“The Economic Status of Rural America in the President Trump Era and Beyond”) was cited in the Economic Report of the President and a Federal Reserve report.

Bauman, A., DePhelps, C., & McFadden, D. T. (2019). Assessing a local food system: The Palouse-Clearwater Food Coalition assessment process. Journal of Agriculture, Food Systems, and Community Development, 8(C), 1-12.

Bauman, A., McFadden, D. T., & Jablonski, B. B. (2018). The financial performance implications of differential marketing strategies: Exploring farms that pursue local markets as a core competitive advantage. Agricultural and Resource Economics Review, 47(3), 477-504.

Bell, K. P., Crandall, M., Munroe, D. K., Colocousis, C., & Morzillo, A. (2018). Rural forest-based communities, economic shocks, and economic trajectories.

Betz, M. R., & Jones, L. E. (2018). Wage and employment growth in America’s drug epidemic: Is all growth created equal?. American journal of agricultural economics, 100(5), 1357-1374.

Cai, Z., Stephens, H. M., & Winters, J. V. (2019). Motherhood, Migration, and Self-Employment of College Graduates.

Castillo, M. J., Low, S. A., & Thilmany McFadden, D. D. (2018). Local Foods as a Catalyst of Rural Manufacturing: The Role of New and Small Food Innovators in Employment Dynamics.

Chen, Y., Park, H., Chen, Y., Corcoran, P., Cox, D., Reimer, J. J., & Weber, B. (2018). Integrated Engineering-Economic Model for the Assessment of Regional Economic Vulnerability to Tsunamis. Natural Hazards Review, 19(4), 04018018.

Cleary, R., Goetz, S. J., McFadden, D. T., & Ge, H. (2019). Excess Competition among Food Hubs. Journal of Agricultural and Resource Economics, 44(1835-2019-067), 141.

Costanza, K. K., Crandall, M., Rice, R., Livingston, W. H., Munck, I., & Lombard, K. (2019). Economic implications of a native tree disease, Caliciopsis canker, on northeastern USA's white pine (Pinus strobus) lumber industry. Canadian Journal of Forest Research, (ja).

Das, B, and Skidmore, M. 2018.  “Asymmetry in Municipal Government Responses in Growing vs. Shrinking Counties with Focus on Capital Spending”, Journal of Regional Analysis and Policy, 48(4): 62-75, 2018.

Deller, S., Kures, M., & Conroy, T. (2019). Rural entrepreneurship and migration. Journal of Rural Studies, 66, 30-42.

Deller, S. C., Conroy, T., & Markeson, B. (2018). Social capital, religion and small business activity. Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 155, 365-381.

Deller, S., & Whitacre, B. (2018). Broadband's Relationship to Rural Housing Values. Papers in Regional Science.

Goetz, S. J., Davlasheridze, M., Han, Y., & Fleming-Muñoz, D. A. (2018). Explaining the 2016 Vote for President Trump across US Counties. Applied Economic Perspectives and Policy.

Goetz, S. J., Partridge, M. D., & Stephens, H. M. (2018). The economic status of rural America in the President Trump era and beyond. Applied Economic Perspectives and Policy, 40(1), 97-118.

Han, Y., & Goetz, S. J. (2019). Predicting US county economic resilience from industry input-output accounts. Applied Economics, 51(19), 2019-2028.

Han, Y., & Goetz, S. J. (2019). Overlapping labour market areas based on link communities. Papers in Regional Science, 98(1), 539-553.

Hodge, T., Ballard, C., and Skidmore, M.  2018. “Changes in the Benefits of the Taxable Value Cap when Property Tax Values are Decreasing:  Evidence from Michigan”, Public Finance and Management, 18(3/4): 313-335, 2018.

Jablonski, B. B., Sullins, M., & Thilmany McFadden, D. (2019). Community-Supported Agriculture Marketing Performance: Results from Pilot Market Channel Assessments in Colorado. Sustainability, 11(10), 2950.

Kang, S., and Skidmore, M. 2018. “The Effects of Natural Disasters on Social Trust:  Evidence from South Korea”, Sustainability, 10, 2973.

Lim, J, and Skidmore, M.  2019. “Natural Disasters and their Impact on Cities.” In Oxford Bibliographies in Urban Studies. Ed. Richardson Dilworth. New York: Oxford University Press, forthcoming.

Lim, J., and Skidmore, M. 2019. “Flood Fatalities in the United States:  The Roles of Economic Status, Housing, and the National Flood Insurance Program”, Southern Economics Journal, DOI:  10.1002/soej.12330.

Motoyama, Y., Goetz, S., & Han, Y. (2018). Where do entrepreneurs get information? An analysis of twitter-following patterns. Journal of Small Business & Entrepreneurship, 30(3), 253-274.

O’Haraa, J. K., & Shidelerb, D. (2018). Do Farmers’ Markets Boost Main Street? Direct-to-Consumer Agricultural Production Impacts on the Food Retail Sector. Journal of Food Distribution Research, 49(2).

Partridge, M. D., & Tsvetkova, A. (2018). Local ability to" rewire" and socioeconomic performance: Evidence from US counties before and after the Great Recession.

Ringwood, L., Watson, P., & Lewin, P. (2019). A quantitative method for measuring regional economic resilience to the great recession. Growth and Change, 50(1), 381-402.

Rossi, J., Woods, T. A., & Davis, A. F. (2018). The Local Food System Vitality Index. Journal of Agriculture, Food Systems, and Community Development, 8(3), 1-22.

Shideler, D., Bauman, A., Thilmany, D., & Jablonski, B. B. (2018). Putting Local Food Dollars to Work: The Economic Benefits of Local Food Dollars to Workers, Farms and Communities. Choices, 33(3), 1-8.

Shideler, D., & Watson, P. (2019). Making change through local food production: Calculating the economic impact of your local food project. Journal of Agriculture, Food Systems, and Community Development, 8(C), 1-13.

Stephens, H. M., & Deskins, J. (2018). Economic Distress and Labor Market Participation. American Journal of Agricultural Economics, 100(5), 1336-1356.

Tsvetkova, A., Partridge, M., & Betz, M. (2019). Self-employment effects on regional growth: a bigger bang for a buck?. Small Business Economics, 52(1), 27-45.

Toya, H., and Skidmore, M.  2018. “Cell Phones and Natural Disaster Vulnerability?”, Sustainability, 10, 2970.

Van Sandt, A., Low, S. A., & Thilmany, D. (2018). Exploring Regional Patterns of Agritourism in the US: What's Driving Clusters of Enterprises?. Agricultural and Resource Economics Review, 47(3), 592-609.

Weinstein, A. L., Partridge, M. D., & Tsvetkova, A. (2018). Follow the money: Aggregate, sectoral and spatial effects of an energy boom on local earnings. Resources Policy, 55, 196-209.

Whitacre, B. E., Alam, M. R., & Lobo, B. J. (2018). Econometric error nullifies finding of the impact of broadband speed on county-level employment. Information Economics and Policy.