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...

Multifunctionality of agriculture is being heralded as a way to achieve food and fiber production while simultaneously providing ecological services and promoting rural development through the establishment of new enterprises. However, in order for multifunctional agriculture to achieve these...

Although all land use is local, few problems require the more urgent attention of state legislators than that of land use. How land is used has important economic, social and environmental consequences that may affect all residents of a state. States must take on more active roles as...

Earlier analyses of farm-level inequality are extended by incorporating measures of inequality between groups of farmers and multiple attributes, including years of education. Single- and multi-dimensional inequality declined between 1985 and 1989. A sharp decrease occurred in inequality among...

The objective of this paper is to empirically examine the relationship between changes in per capita manufacturing employment, manufacturing earnings per worker and human capital investment in nearly 3,000 U.S. counties over the period 1980-90. Two key hypotheses are tested: 1. Communities in...

The challenges associated with (back-) migration of people to rural communities in the 1990s are examined. It is argued that reducing the "brain drain" from rural areas through the creation of job opportunities for college-educated individuals, is central to an effective rural(community)...

In this paper, we define social capital from different perspectives and show how it is linked to the concept of a community. Based on these definitions, a conceptual framework for analyzing and measuring social capital and its indicators is developed. A typology for analyzing social capital is...

In this paper we attempt to identify and model factors associated with medical doctors' county-level location decisions. Our goal is to determine whether public policy levers and private incentives exist which can be manipulated to increase the availability of doctors in rural areas. After...

This is a new version of a series of color slides on social capital as presented at a conference on rural development presented in Tampa, Florida in 2004, and sponsored by the Southern Rural Development Center.