The slides that follow provide an introduction to rural economic development and public policy. I have scanned the original slides and inserted them into modern PDF and PowerPoint presentations. Some of the hand-made charts have older data, but could be easily updated. These color slides were...

The effective delivery of computerized decision aids for policymakers who must deal with problems of economic development has been of increasing interest to both extension and research workers in rural development. This paper describes efforts recently completed at the University of Kentucky...

The incidence of diseases and accidents that lead to death is not uniform throughout the U.S. but rather varies widely among different regions. This study uses county-level data on numbers and causes of death for the entire U.S. in an effort to link these causes of death to various county-level...

This study examines the impacts of socioeconomic characteristics of a region on the availability of resources for public elementary and secondary education. A public school administrator is assumed to be confronted with a problem analogous to that confronted by any other firm manager. An...

This paper examines why developed countries are monogamous while rich men throughout history have tended to practice polygyny (multiple wives). Wealth inequality naturally produces multiple wives for rich men in a standard model of the marriage market. This paper argues that the sources of...

This paper investigates the issue of child labor in the context of land reforms in transition economies, using farm household data from the Republic of Georgia. The results show that an increase in landholdings as an outcome of the land reform can, in the presence of market imperfections, lead...

Tajikistan is classified by the World Bank as one of the CIS countries that are most vulnerable to climate change risks. This paper provides a closer look at a set of variables that determine Tajikistan’s vulnerability to risk in general and to climate change risk in particular. After...

This paper uses inequality decomposition techniques in order to analyze the consequences of entrepreneurial activities to household income inequality in Southern Ethiopia. A uniform increase in entrepreneurial income reduces per capita household income inequality. This implies that encouraging...

The Aldeia Nova project aimed at demobilizing ex-combatants to remote areas and settling them in modern agricultural communities. Three years since the first settlers arrived at the Waku-Kungu valley, 600 families are using modern agricultural technology to produce milk, eggs and vegetables...