The way in which the economic base of regional economies influences the viability of the communities that serve them has been a subject of inquiry for several decades. Many previous studies have been static in nature, thereby failing to capture the influence of changes in the base through time....

Throughout the second half of the 20th Century, urbanization, new technologies, rapid labor-saving productivity growth in primary industries, and improved highways combined to create large-scale rural-urban functionally integrated regions. These forces have raised the stakes for regions in their...

Despite the large sums of money spent to ostensibly support rural areas since the 1930s, a framework for assessing U.S. and Canadian rural policy is conspicuously absent, and thus there is little basis for assessing effectiveness of public policy and public expenditures in this area. The purpose...

We estimate the impact of the removal of a railway transportation subsidy on the adoption of technology for Western Canadian farms, using a unique combination of Census and freight rate data. We exploit the large regional variation in these one-time freight rate increases in order to identify...

Occupational segregation by gender persists in spite of improvements in labor market gender equality over the past 40 years. In this paper a simple index of occupational segregation, the D-Index, computed for each of the 288 census divisions in Canada for the year 2000 is regressed on a measure...

The social economy holds promise for rural community development through local capacity building, improving political engagement, expanding networks, and increasing productivity by reducing transactions costs. In this study, the contribution of co-op membership to rural community population...

In recent decades, non‐farm employment has become prevalent and an important source of income for Australian farm families. However, models identifying the relative significance of the socioeconomic variables influencing non‐farm employment participation rates have never been estimated in...