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...

Even as self-employment continues to increase, policymakers remain largely unaware of this trend and fail to see it as an opportunity for addressing enduring joblessness. In part, this is explained by limited data on the self-employed and by widespread perceptions that returns to self-employment...