Suchergebnisse

A model based on social accounting techniques is used to quantify the relative importance of traditional and nontraditional elements of the economic base of rural areas. Empirical analysis is focused on the Western Isles, Scotland. The results highlight the importance of central government funding of public services. They also indicate that exogenous transfers of income direct to households support 8% of jobs and 7% of factor earnings in the region. It is argued that, in addition to industry structure and input–output linkages, rural economic-base multipliers depend on the demographic profile of the local population and the extent of interdependencies between local production and consumption.

The author surveyed how top management posts are filled in the 50 state governments. Below their direct patronage powers, governors and their political appointees have increasing influence over a netherworld of policy-involved exempt, unclassified, noncompetitive, management contract, senior executive services, and "at will employment" personnel classes. These "exempt managers" serve as a buffer between the top political appointees and the traditional protected civil service, and they are increasingly more career and merit oriented. Firings are rare due to the need for competence and continuity and the legal ambiguities of these employees' rights, but their ambiguous roles need more professional definition.

The paper explores whether incomers pay a price premium for rural housing and, if so, whether it varies according to the origin of the buyer. Empirical analysis focuses on Aberdeenshire, Scotland, distinguishing between housing in the accessible and remote rural locations within the region. Buyers originating from Aberdeen city are found to pay more than locals in accessible rural housing markets, with the price premium highest in the high-quality housing-market segment. There is, however, no evidence that a price premium is paid by in-migrants from more distant locations. In contrast, consistent with information asymmetry and higher search costs, buyers from the rest of the UK are found to pay significantly more for high-quality properties in the remote rural area. From a methodological perspective the findings support the use of multilevel models which allow for unobserved neighbourhood effects.

A temporal structural path analysis of the Shetland Islands from 1971 to 2003 is used to describe the process by which two new sectors associated with the discovery of North Sea oil became integrated into the wider Shetland economy. The results confirm that it can take considerable time for incoming sectors to become integrated within an economy and that integration may increase when a sector is in decline. It is argued that structural path analysis provides complementary insights into the process of economic integration which are complementary to those gained from more standard multiplier techniques, and that both are useful to rural development analysts charged with maximising the benefits of incoming sectors and/or minimising the adverse effects of a sector in decline.