Poverty is not evenly distributed across the American landscape. At the county level of aggregation, poverty is overwhelmingly a rural problem, with the most remote rural places at the greatest disadvantage. 1 Although research has shown that “place matters†in poverty outcomes and...

This paper explores and develops three ideas: (1) that the aridity of western North America and its attendant characteristics have fundamentally shaped the work of western agricultural economists and encouraged some distinctive western contributions to the study of economics; (2) that, in order...