Population Change, Economic Restructuring, and the Evolving Landscape of Retail Activities in the Rural Great Plains

Over the past 15 to 20 years, changes such as retail concentration (fewer, larger stores owned by fewer corporations), technological innovation, and new labor practices have transformed the retail industry. These broad changes affect rural communities where the retail sector still employs a large portion of the workforce. When combined with the declining population of many rural areas in regions like the Great Plains, the impact of retail change is even more significant. Explored in this paper is how restructuring in the retail sector is accelerating the loss of retail firms in many rural parts of the Great Plains, a region already suffering retail losses from depopulation processes and increased accessibility to larger urban retail centers. The analysis presented will show the changes in retail that took place between 1988 and 1999, and investigate how retail restructuring and demographic change interact at the county level to produce new rural economic landscapes for people in the Great Plains, a situation that is likely to be found in other rural areas with similar demographic structures

Differential Population and Income Migration in the Great Plains, 1995- 1998

The depopulation of the Great Plains continues to draw the attention of rural scholars. However, a number of aspects of migration in the region remain poorly understood. For example, what differences exist among migrants in terms of their economic characteristics? Recent research shows that there is tremendous variability in the amount of income each migrant brings to or takes from a region. Using county-level Internal Revenue Service data for migration flows between 1995 and 1998, we explore the spatial patterns of income and population migration, while contrasting the income flows of in-migrants versus out-migrants. The results show that income flows out of the Great Plains exceed what might be expected given the pattern of net out-migration, and that many of the migration flows into the region may be reinforcing pockets of poverty. These findings should concern local officials worried about preserving public and private services in rural areas in the face of a declining population and tax base

Pro-neural transcription factors as cancer markers.

BACKGROUND: The aberrant transcription in cancer of genes normally associated with embryonic tissue differentiation at various organ sites may be a hallmark of tumour progression. For example, neuroendocrine differentiation is found more commonly in cancers destined to progress, including prostate and lung. We sought to identify proteins which are involved in neuroendocrine differentiation and differentially expressed in aggressive/metastatic tumours. RESULTS: Expression arrays were used to identify up-regulated transcripts in a neuroendocrine (NE) transgenic mouse model of prostate cancer. Amongst these were several genes normally expressed in neural tissues, including the pro-neural transcription factors Ascl1 and Hes6. Using quantitative RT-PCR and immuno-histochemistry we showed that these same genes were highly expressed in castrate resistant, metastatic LNCaP cell-lines. Finally we performed a meta-analysis on expression array datasets from human clinical material. The expression of these pro-neural transcripts effectively segregates metastatic from localised prostate cancer and benign tissue as well as sub-clustering a variety of other human cancers. CONCLUSION: By focussing on transcription factors known to drive normal tissue development and comparing expression signatures for normal and malignant mouse tissues we have identified two transcription factors, Ascl1 and Hes6, which appear effective markers for an aggressive phenotype in all prostate models and tissues examined. We suggest that the aberrant initiation of differentiation programs may confer a selective advantage on cells in all contexts and this approach to identify biomarkers therefore has the potential to uncover proteins equally applicable to pre-clinical and clinical cancer biology.RIGHTS : This article is licensed under the BioMed Central licence at http://www.biomedcentral.com/about/license which is similar to the 'Creative Commons Attribution Licence'. In brief you may : copy, distribute, and display the work; make derivative works; or make commercial use of the work - under the following conditions: the original author must be given credit; for any reuse or distribution, it must be made clear to others what the license terms of this work are

Specification of economic base multipliers in small Arizona communities

Despite a wide assortment of problems that cover a broad range of topics, from questions and doubts about its theoretical underpinnings, to a host of application difficulties, economic base analysis still figures prominently in the geographic literature. This thesis uses the Arizona Community Data Set to examine two important issues that remain unresolved or inadequately addressed in the literature. The results presented support Tiebout's hypothesis that the Keynesian macroeconomic approach, emphasizing the role of all the sectors in an economy produces more reliable multipliers estimates than Hoyt's traditional approach. Additionally, it is shown that, through disaggregation, it is possible to use the relationships between sectoral basic and nonbasic employment to produce multipliers that resemble those obtained through input-output analysis. Overall the results suggest that with the use of reliable survey data the economic base concept can still produce valuable information on the effects of an impact in a small community

An analysis of population and employment growth in the nonmetropolitan Rocky Mountain West, 1970-1995

Over the past 25 years, long-term trends in population and employment change for the US have been dramatically altered. At the regional level, areas like the Rocky Mountain West (AZ, CO, ID, MT, NV, NM, UT, and WY) have seen the century-long decline in nonmetropolitan population reversed to some degree. Scholars from across the US have proposed several broad theories to explain these shifts; however, researchers based in the RMW have argued that any general theory of growth and development must be adapted to take into account the region's unique geography and history. For example, population and employment change in RMW has been more volatile and extreme due to the region's reliance on extractive industries. The purpose of this dissertation is to present preliminary findings of an investigation of population and employment change in the RMW in general, and to test the claims of regional researchers on the processes behind these changes. The ideas of these researchers are embodied in the quality-of-life model, which claims that changing residential preferences, demographic changes, and economic restructuring will benefit areas like the nonmetropolitan RMW, an area rich in amenities. Using a wide variety of tools ranging from descriptive statistics, to classification techniques, to multivariate regression models, this research measures how factors theorized to be associated with growth have increased (decreased) in importance over the 25 year span of this study. The results show that regionally-based ideas on growth have a place in helping scholars understand regional growth processes in a more reliable manner. More importantly, there is significant support for the quality-of-life model, especially the role of service industries and environmental amenities in driving regional growth. Answers to these questions will help scholars understand the extent to which national events are being restructured in regional contexts. Additionally, until these ideas are fully tested and shown to explain some of the events and underlying processes driving population and employment growth in the RMW, long-term policies designed to help plan for the continued growth of the region may be misguided and wasteful

Jobs Follow People in the Rural Rocky Mountain West

Over the past 25 years, employment growth has followed population growth in the Rocky Mountain West. The allure of amenities to potential migrants and employers, especially for counties rich in pristine natural landscapes, has increased over time. As with other U.S. nonmetro counties, the service and trade sectors now dominate employment in the Rocky Mountains

The Influence of Booms and Busts in the U.S. Economy on the Interstate Migration System

Migration flows around the U.S. have shown a great deal of temporal and geographical differentiation over the past few decades. However, the recent downturn in the U.S. economy provides a renewed motivation to explore the relationship between the macro-economy and interstate migration. To address this issue, in this paper patterns of interstate migration are analyzed using IRS data and several migration efficiency measures for 18 2-year time periods, 1988-2006. Included in the analysis is an examination of the relationship between system migration and economic change, structural changes in the migration system over time (national and state level), and changes in the geography of state-level migration efficiency rates. As might be expected, the two full business cycles that occurred over this time period saw significant short-term changes in migration flows, although the economic downturn of 2001-02 may indicate more fundamental changes in the migration system. Copyright (c) 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc..

Pro-neural transcription factors as cancer markers.

BACKGROUND: The aberrant transcription in cancer of genes normally associated with embryonic tissue differentiation at various organ sites may be a hallmark of tumour progression. For example, neuroendocrine differentiation is found more commonly in cancers destined to progress, including prostate and lung. We sought to identify proteins which are involved in neuroendocrine differentiation and differentially expressed in aggressive/metastatic tumours. RESULTS: Expression arrays were used to identify up-regulated transcripts in a neuroendocrine (NE) transgenic mouse model of prostate cancer. Amongst these were several genes normally expressed in neural tissues, including the pro-neural transcription factors Ascl1 and Hes6. Using quantitative RT-PCR and immuno-histochemistry we showed that these same genes were highly expressed in castrate resistant, metastatic LNCaP cell-lines. Finally we performed a meta-analysis on expression array datasets from human clinical material. The expression of these pro-neural transcripts effectively segregates metastatic from localised prostate cancer and benign tissue as well as sub-clustering a variety of other human cancers. CONCLUSION: By focussing on transcription factors known to drive normal tissue development and comparing expression signatures for normal and malignant mouse tissues we have identified two transcription factors, Ascl1 and Hes6, which appear effective markers for an aggressive phenotype in all prostate models and tissues examined. We suggest that the aberrant initiation of differentiation programs may confer a selective advantage on cells in all contexts and this approach to identify biomarkers therefore has the potential to uncover proteins equally applicable to pre-clinical and clinical cancer biology.RIGHTS : This article is licensed under the BioMed Central licence at http://www.biomedcentral.com/about/license which is similar to the 'Creative Commons Attribution Licence'. In brief you may : copy, distribute, and display the work; make derivative works; or make commercial use of the work - under the following conditions: the original author must be given credit; for any reuse or distribution, it must be made clear to others what the license terms of this work are