RURAL EMPLOYMENT GROWTH IN THE 'NEW ECONOMY': A TEST OF THE SPATIAL DIVISION OF LABOR HYPOTHESIS

Decomposing the occupational structure of rural and urban labor markets allows assessing whether these structures became more alike or more dissimilar between 1970 and 1990. A shift-share method is used to compute 'predicted' and 'specialized' shares for 9 inclusive occupations. A SUR model is used to estimate the convergence process.Labor and Human Capital,

Functional Skill Requirements of Manufacturing Employment in the Rural South

This analysis compares the functional skill requirements of manufacturing employment in rural and urban areas of six Southern states. The General Educational Development-Reasoning Scale provides information on the cognitive requirements of various work tasks while Specific Vocational Preparation provides information on the time of training needed for average performance in a job. The analysis identifies three distinct patterns of comparative skill requirements. Traditional Rural Production is characterized by substantial low-skill employment in both rural and urban areas-the modest number of high-skilled workers are found predominantly in urban areas. Spatial Division of Labor Production is characterized by a large share of middle-skill jobs in both rural and urban areas but with high-skill employment found predominantly in urban areas. Spatially Integrated Production has the highest share of highly-skilled employees and is characterized by relatively similar skill requirements in rural and urban environments

MANUFACTURING SPECIALIZATION IN THE SOUTHEAST: RURAL NECESSITY, RURAL POSSIBILITY OR RURAL VESTIGE?

This paper examines three alternative explanations for manufacturing specialization in rural areas: 1) the greater efficiency of very large plants; 2) the "localization" advantages identified with a number of firms in the same industry locating near each other; or 3) a strategy to gain bargaining power by a dominant employer in the county.rural manufacturing, specialization, economies of scale, localization, monopsony, Industrial Organization,

Exploring Farm Business and Household Expenditure Patterns and Community Linkages

Farm operators are an integral part of some rural economies. The businesses they operate often hire seasonal and full-time employees and purchase goods and services from local farm implement dealers, input suppliers, and financial institutions. Farm household spending on food, furniture and appliances, trucks and automobiles, and a range of consumer goods also support local jobs and retail businesses in some communities. Based on the 2002 agricultural census and the 2004 Agricultural Resource Management Survey, this paper explores the linkages between farm household/ business expenditures and local communities.Farm business expenditures, farm household spending, employment, community linkage, Consumer/Household Economics, Farm Management, Community/Rural/Urban Development,

The Emergence of Rural Artistic Havens: A First Look

Nearly all applied research on arts activity has examined phenomena in metropolitan areas. Findings from this past research confirm an arts specialization in a limited number of cities. This paper finds a similar pattern in nonmetropolitan areas, where a limited number of counties maintain or develop a distinct specialization in the arts. We document the emergence of these "rural artistic havens" and identify county characteristics associated with the attraction of performing, fine, and applied artists. The implications of these findings for rural development strategies focusing on the arts are discussed.arts activity, built amenities, creative class, logistic regression, natural amenities, tourism development, Community/Rural/Urban Development,

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

CONCENTRATION, VULNERABILITY AND ADJUSTMENT: RURAL TEXTILE AND APPAREL EMPLOYMENT AND THE EXPIRATION OF IMPORT QUOTAS

The paper documents the degree of concentration of textile and apparel employment in rural countries, assesses the vulnerability to job loss by detailed industry in light of the expiration of import quotas, and assesses the potential for adjustment of displaced workers

RURAL EMPLOYMENT GROWTH IN THE 'NEW ECONOMY': A TEST OF THE SPATIAL DIVISION OF LABOR HYPOTHESIS

Decomposing the occupational structure of rural and urban labor markets allows assessing whether these structures became more alike or more dissimilar between 1970 and 1990. A shift-share method is used to compute 'predicted' and 'specialized' shares for 9 inclusive occupations. A SUR model is used to estimate the convergence process

The Composition of Rural Employment Growth in the “New Economy”

This article examines changes in the patterns of occupational employment in urban and rural labor markets in seven southern states between 1970 and 1990. A method is developed for assessing whether occupational employment patterns are becoming more differentiated over time. The analysis identifies a process of increasing similarity across all occupational groups between 1970 and 1980. In contrast, the 1980–90 period is characterized by increasing rural specialization in Operator (low-skill) occupations amid increasing similarity in four of nine inclusive occupational categories. These results provide partial support for conjectures regarding greater differentiation of tasks performed in rural and urban labor markets. Copyright 2000, Oxford University Press.