This paper analyzes the effect of family composition, and in particular the number of children, the age gap between the oldest and youngest child and the age of the youngest child, on parents’ involvement in social networks. The predictions of a simple theoretical model are confirmed by an...

Most rural regions are weak participants in the modern economy. As a result they are often seen as inherently incapable of sustained economic growth. Yet, OECD evidence shows that there are rural regions with relatively high rates of economic growth. Increasing the number of high performance...

Fostering higher levels of economic activity in rural regions constitutes an important policy challenge for most OECD countries. While some rural regions have higher than average growth rates, most grow at slower rates than the majority of urban regions. Because rural regions are structurally...

Innovation is largely held to be unlikely in rural regions. This reflects the current emphasis on regional innovations systems that are driven by large expenditures on formal science based activity that results in patentable outcomes. From this metric the observation about rural innovation is...

Between 2006 and 2009, the OECD undertook a series of reviews of national rural development policy. The reviews largely followed a consistent approach and used the OECD's New Rural Paradigm (NRP) as a common metric for assessing various national approaches. Although the reviews cannot be...

The paper provides an overview of the treatment of risk in economics as a way to connect the concept of risk, as used by economists, to the concern of other social science disciplines with how the parallel concepts of vulnerability and resilience affect rural and regional development. These...

This is a new version of a series of color slides on social capital as presented at a conference on rural development presented in Tampa, Florida in 2004, and sponsored by the Southern Rural Development Center.

In Israel, rural communities are those with up to 2000 residents, and rural areas include only rural communities. This paper explores the dependence of rural incomes on nearby urban areas. This dependence is mostly implied by rural-to-urban or urban-to-rural selective migration (or both)....

This paper applies a discrete-choice framework with product differentiation to model the rural tourism industry in Israel and to jointly estimate the effect of lodging and farm characteristics on consumer preferences and firms' costs. The model accounts for heterogeneity in tastes and...