The economic impact of the education and health sector on a rural community´s economy

Many rural communities in the USA are economically depressed due to declining employment opportunities. Some of the causes include increased agricultural mechanization and consolidation, declining manufacturing jobs, inability to attract high tech jobs, and declining mineral prices. Whatever the cause, it is crucial that rural community leaders have their community as attractive as possible for whatever development strategy they pursue. Research supports the fact that to attract business and industry, education and health services are critical quality of life factors important in final location decisions. Likewise, if attracting retirees is a development strategy, research indicates that health and safety are important quality of life variables. The objective of this paper is to demonstrate how important the education and health sectors are to the economy of a rural community. This will be accomplished by utilizing a county input-output model. The model has five health sectors (hospitals, physicians, nursing homes, pharmacies, and other) and two education sectors (primary and secondary education and vocational education). The model will estimate income and employment impacts of the health and education sectors. In addition, the model will project the impact that these sectors have on community retail sales. The model uses readily available data from IMPLAN. Thus, the study can easily be replicated in U.S. counties and communities. The paper will present results of the application of the model to Atoka County, a rural county in southeastern Oklahoma. The 2000 census population fir Atoka was 13,879 with the largest community having 2,988 residents. Health and education employment and income data (wages and salaries and proprietor income) were collected directly from county businesses. The input-output model was run to measure the indirect and induced impacts. The results show how important these sectors are to jobs and income as well as the services they provide. Direct employment in the health and education sectors was approximately 17 percent of the total county employment and income base. Adding the indirect and induced impacts brings the total impact of these sectors to about 25 percent. It also must be recognized that these sectors are growing and many jobs are above the county's average wage rate. The results of this study can be used to demonstrate to local residents the importance of the health and education sectors to the local economy and why they should support these sectors. Local residents need to be encouraged to use local health services such that these services are provided locally and remain economically viable. Also, if local tax support is needed for health or education services, the study will document the importance of these sectors to the local economy.

Computer Selection and Use for Rural Water Systems.

2 p

The Community Economic Development Toolkit

This article describes the toolkit available to community economic development educators at the Oklahoma Cooperative Extension Service. The types of tools fall into two categories: educational programming and technical assistance. Rural communities that have committed themselves to the process of economic development can benefit from the various tools in the toolkit. The tools can be used singly; however, they tend to work best when used together as a part of a comprehensive community-based plan for economic development

Influence of the Community Economic Base on Off-Farm Employment

Current research indicates the prevalence of off-farm employment among United States farm families creates an important linkage between farm and nonfarm sectors of the economy. The contention is that the nonfarm sector contributes through this medium to the economic viability of the farm sector. Despite the relevance of this linkage, few attempts have been made to further specify its nature. This study examines the extent and source (by industry) of off-farm employment in Texas nonmetropolitan counties, classified by their economic base. Data are from the 1980 Census of Population and the classification of nonmetro counties developed by ERS, USDA. The analysis explores differentials in the strength and nature of this farm-nonfarm economic linkage in nonmetro economies dominated by different basic industries. Particular attention is paid to counties with agricultural economic bases

The Dark Side of the Tomb: a landscape study utilizing archaeological excavation, multi-modal geophysical survey and imaging techniques of the Neolithic and Early Bronze Age monuments on the Isle of Anglesey, North Wales

The study of prehistoric monuments on the Isle of Anglesey has a long history dating back to at least the 18th century, despite this the area surrounding these monuments have seen little to no invasive archaeological investigation. This PhD research project utilises geophysical surveys to investigate the landscape surrounding four Late Neolithic/Early Bronze Age monuments at Bryn Celli Ddu, Ty Newydd, The Llanfechell Triangle and the Penbodeistedd Stone. The surveys at Bryn Celli Ddu discovered burials associated with the Bronze Age, a stone circle, and a developed Iron Age settlement. The survey at Ty Newydd discovered a Bronze Age cemetery that shares the ridge with the extant megalithic monument. The survey at The Llanfechell Triangle discovered anomalies associated with satellite burials of Bronze Age date and a trackway of ancient date that links the site to a Bronze Age cemetery to the northeast. The results of the survey at the Penbodeistedd stone suggest that this standing monolith was once part of a stone circle. An excavation was carried out at the newly discovered site known as Bedd Y Foel which uncovered evidence proving that this site is a badly destroyed megalithic tomb of Neolithic date. The results of this thesis have uncovered significant findings at each of the study sites including an Iron Age settlement, possible stone circles and a previously undiscovered megalithic tomb. These findings bring new insights into the prehistoric period of Anglesey and showcase the need for further study on the island

The Determinants of a Healthy Board: A Tool for Extension Professionals

Board governance is a critical factor that affects the development of people and businesses in rural America. In this article, we explain how the health of a board can be measured based on a set of performance indicators from the board governance literature. Extension professionals can use these determinants as a tool for evaluating a board\u27s health before engaging in more specialized educational programming assistance

A method for decomposing the impact of reforms on the long-run income distribution, with an application to universal credit

Income inequality, as well as the impact of tax and benefit reforms on it, has typically been evaluated with respect to ‘snapshot’ incomes, measured over short periods such as one week or year. But longitudinal data allows long-run measures of income to be used, which will be of interest to policymakers interested in persistent, rather than only temporary, poverty. We show that the long-run distributional impact of a reform is the combination of three effects: a ‘static’ effect, which would be observed if individuals’ circumstances were consistent throughout their life; an ‘income dynamics’ effect, resulting from individuals moving around the income distribution over time; and a ‘tagging’ effect, resulting from the reform affecting individuals differently according to whether they have a characteristic predictive of long-run income conditional on current income. We propose a simple method to decompose these three effects for any inequality, poverty, or distributional statistic. We use the method to examine the distributional impact of the introduction of ‘Universal Credit’, the most important reform to the UK benefit system in decades. We show that Universal Credit is less regressive on a long-run basis than a snapshot one, partly because of income dynamics but also because it reduces entitlements for (or ‘negatively tags’) those who are more likely to find a period of low income to be temporary, rather than persistent

Sustainability of Community-owned Repository Software: A Call to Action

CNI 2017 Spring Membership MeetingSustainability of open-source software is a continual challenge in the relatively small world of cultural heritage institutions. The challenge is amplified due to the critical preservation implications tied to institutional commitments; cultural heritage institutions are expected to preserve and provide access to repository-held data into the foreseeable future, and yet our models for shared software governance are relatively immature, and commitments to software sustainability ebb and flow over time. The cultural, financial, and philosophical dimensions of the community surrounding the software play as much, if not more, of a role in a project’s sustainability as the technology itself. With a collective thirty years of experience grappling with these challenges, the speakers will offer varied perspectives on approaches to ensuring the software that supports the long-term preservation and accessibility of our digital heritage will still exist tomorrow. This session will dive deeper into the specific challenges faced by a few open-source repository software communities, outlining what the Islandora, Hydra, and Fedora communities have done to address sustainability in their projects, past and present, and how well these measures have succeeded. Specific tactics for engaging in these projects will be offered as a call to action

Selecting and Purchasing a Computer for Use in Local Government.

2 p