While a substantial amount of research has been devoted to showing what social capital does, research explaining social capital itself lags behind. The literature has a long tradition of examining the effect of social capital on local economic growth and development. In this paper we examine...

The free market-based policies of the corporate community model have skewed economic development across the South. For many small, rural communities, the consequences of global capitalism have resulted in declining real wages, high underemployment, and increasing rates of income inequality....

Three economic opportunities are presented for rural areas in this invited paper session: selfemployment, investments in broadband infrastructure, and agritourism. Self-employment has shown growth in rural regions at the expense of wage and salary employment in the longterm. Production...