Deficient Bridges in Illinois
The Illinois Report 2008
Drake Warren
January 2008
Abstract. Though the status of major bridges in Illinois compares favorably to those in neighboring states, Illinois nonetheless faces challenges in the form of increasing traffic on many bridges which were not designed for such high demand. Illinois is not at the moment in the kind of danger that Minnesota faced when its I35 W bridge over the Mississippi River collapsed in August 2007, but it is nevertheless true that many bridges in Illinois require maintenance and upgrading, a project which is extremely costly.
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State Rural Development Policy
Special Issue, Journal of Regional Analysis and Policy, Vol 37, No. 1
Guest Editors: Edward Feser and Andrew M. Isserman
Spring 2007
A collection of 21 short policy papers available at http://www.jrap-journal.org/pastvolumes/2000/v37/index371.html
Papers by University of Illinois authors:

• Examples and Principles of State-Level Rural Environmental Initiatives, by Amy Ando
• Encouraging Broadband Deployment from the Bottom Up, by Edward Feser
• Getting State Rural Policy Right: Definitions, Growth, and Program Eligibility, by Andrew Isserman
• State-level Rural Health Policy, by Paul E. McNamara
• Roles for State Government in International Trade, by Alex Winter-Nelson

Why Some Rural Communities Prosper While Others Do Not
Andrew M. Isserman, Edward Feser and Drake Warren
May 23, 2007
Abstract. The language of decline and disadvantage dominates discussions of rural America. Rural poverty, rural distress, rural population loss, and rural competitive disadvantages receive ample attention in the popular press and the scholarly literature. This research focuses instead on rural prosperity, something so overlooked and unknown that many might think it an oxymoron. In fact, more than 300 rural counties and 200 mixed rural counties are more prosperous than the nation as a whole. Each has lower unemployment rates, lower poverty rates, lower school dropout rates, and better housing conditions than the nation. This research seeks to understand why. The diverse theories considered focus on location, the economy, urban-rural linkages, highways and airports, human and social capital, diversity and homogeneity, knowledge and creativity, and climate and topography. Some of the statistical results support empirically what many rural people believe to be true: religious groups and other identities that bind people together can really matter. Some findings are more conventional. Rural communities with relatively more people with some college education are more likely to prosper, as are communities with vigorous, competitive, private economies. Others contradict conventional thought. Geographical factors that are impossible or expensive to change, including climate and distances to cities and major airports, are relatively unimportant in distinguishing between prosperous and other rural places. Rural development thinking that focuses on prosperity, instead of the usual focus on growth, provides different answers and insights. Prosperity is a useful, new lens through which to consider the rural condition and rural policy.
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The Rural Role in National Value Chains and Regional Clusters
Edward Feser and Andrew Isserman
January 15, 2007
Abstract. The fullest understanding of the implications of industrial interdependence for rural economies requires viewing clusters on a spatial continuum, from those that are national or even global in geographic scope to those that are highly localized in specific places. Rural economies may depend on, and contribute to, the competitive success of clusters anchored elsewhere. A search for strictly locally-based clusters, or even those nearby that spill into rural communities, understates the rural role in the national economy and may generate a misleading picture of the underlying economic base and potential of a given place. We operationalize our perspective in two ways using a unique classification of 45 U.S. industry value chains together with a new rural-urban county typology. First, we investigate the role rural economies play in integrated national systems of production by exploring the overall rural-urban distribution of the 45 U.S. industry value chains and their functional economic characteristics in rural versus urban areas. Second, we explore the extent to which rural areas are part of regional industry clusters by using a local indicator of spatial association (LISA) to search for geographically distinct multi-county regions of value chain employment. We apply this regional cluster analysis approach to one particular value chain: motor vehicles. Our results demonstrate that rural America plays an integral part in a great variety of U.S. value chains. Federal, state, or local development agencies must be careful not to view rural cluster strategy strictly as the development of groups of linked and related industries concentrated in specific rural places. There is an opportunity to identify and leverage the advantages of rural locations for businesses and industries in globally competitive and geographically extensive value chains. Clusters have been linked to the competitiveness of nations, and the rural contribution to nations’ competitiveness remains obscured if industry clusters are defined narrowly in geographical terms.
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Industrialization of U.S. Agriculture: The New Geography of Animal Production and Slaughter
Drake Warren and Andrew Isserman
August 14, 2006
Abstract. This report makes four contributions to understanding the link between the livestock industry and rural development. Its main goal is to provide a solid factual foundation for public policy. First, it examines trends in the location and concentration of livestock production. It uses methods of spatial analysis to examine receipts from sales of livestock by county from 1969 through 2004 and detects changes in trends and a new form of dispersed concentration. Second, it updates previous studies of plant location and size trends in the meat industry. They used data stopping in 1992, raising the specter that today’s policies are being designed with outdated perceptions of realities. Third, in another novel aspect, this report analyzes the relationship between the location of meat processing plants and livestock production. Key questions are whether producers must transport their livestock greater distances to processing plants and whether the trend to megaplants is leaving producers in parts of the country without processing capacity and unable to compete. Fourth, this report analyzes the rural-urban distribution of livestock production and slaughter using a new county classification system. The traditional split finds one-third of livestock production and half of animal slaughter in urban areas, but the new system reveals that 93% of livestock production, 81% of animal slaughtering, and 86% of poultry processing are in rural and mixed rural counties. This report identifies the types of rural places in which livestock production and meat processing are locating. The new geography of livestock production is both more complex and less alarming than popular conceptions.
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Harnessing Growth Spillovers for Rural Development: The Effects of Regional Spatial Structure
Edward Feser and Andrew Isserman
August 3, 2006
Abstract. Many rural development strategies seek to leverage urban-to-rural growth spillovers. This paper concludes that their success depends on the spatial structure surrounding the target rural counties. We develop a county-level spatial growth model to identify the positive spread and negative backwash effects of urban to rural spillovers in the lower 48 states over the 1990-2000 period. Instead of the conventional, fallacious substitution of metropolitan and nonmetropolitan for urban and rural, we consider the urban and rural character of each county. Most counties have both urban and rural populations, and we classify each as urban, mixed urban, or rural depending on the relative sizes of its urban and rural populations, the absolute size of its urban population, and its overall population density. We then develop a generalized simultaneous cross-regressive model that permits a flexible array of tests for spillover influences among the three county types and over various distances. We find evidence of positive spread effects on rural county employment growth from growth originating in nearby highly urbanized counties, but rural counties appear to suffer negative backwash effects from employment growth in nearby mixed urban/rural counties, and they do not benefit from nearby rural growth. Our results can be interpreted in the context of six classic regional development scenarios, each of which posits a unique regional spatial structure within which rural economies are embedded: the expanding monocentric city, the declining urban core, the sprawling low-density city, the large multi-centered urban region, the central place and its hinterland, and the isolated resourcedependent rural area. The research demonstrates that the prospects of urban-rural growth diffusion vary by scenario, and it cautions strongly against basing rural development programs on any single archetypal understanding of urban-rural growth diffusion.
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Detecting university-industry synergies: A comparison of two approaches in applied cluster analysis
Edward Feser and Shannon Landwehr
Latest version: April 10, 2006
Abstract. As the practice of formulating regional development strategies around various concepts of industry clusters has grown, so has the variety of methodologies for detecting appropriate areas of policy intervention. A particular challenge for
regions interested in facilitating the growth of technology-based industries and business start-ups is the conceptualization and measurement of the linkages between the regional science base, reflected most heavily in the region’s universities but also in its non-academic research laboratories, and its industrial base (Paytas, Gradeck et al., 2004). According to most cluster theories, businesses
are at the core of competitive clusters, with universities and other institutions forming a critical support infrastructure for continued industrial innovation and productivity growth. Following this view, many early applied regional cluster studies focused on detecting existing critical masses of businesses in related sectors, with the degree of “relatedness” varying from membership in the same
industry (a crude sector-based approach), to membership in buyer-supplier chains, utilization of similar technologies, or linkages via formal or informal innovation flows (Cortright, 2006). The implication in such studies is that strategies should aim to further strengthen large concentrations of related industries—effectively the region’s industrial specializations—since, by virtue of their large absolute and relative size, they represent clear regional competitive advantages
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Clusters and rural economies in economic and geographic space
Edward Feser and Andrew Isserman
Latest version: November 27, 2005
Abstract. We argue that understanding the role of clusters in rural economies requires viewing industry clusters on a spatial continuum, from those that are national or even global in scope to those that are highly localized. We use a new rural-urban typology
together with a recently developed set of 45 U.S. value chain clusters to operationalize our perspective in two ways. First, we explore the overall rural-urban distribution of the 45 value chains as well as their functional economic characteristics in rural areas. Second, we use a local indicator of spatial association to search for spatially distinct multi-county clusters of employment in one particular value chain: motor vehicles. We find that while rural economies specialize in natural resource- and agriculture-based
economic clusters, they also play a significant role in a number of manufacturing and non-manufacturing clusters, highlighting the diversity of rural counties’ external linkages. We also find that of 15 geographic clusters of the motor vehicles value chain in
the U.S., 14 consist partly of rural and/or mixed rural counties. Overall, the majority of activity in the 15 spatial motor vehicles clusters is situated in mixed rural and mixed urban counties.
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Benchmark value chain industry clusters for applied regional research
Edward Feser
Latest version: October 15, 2005
Abstract. It is common in regional industry cluster analysis to begin by exploring recent economic trends using cluster “benchmarks” as a unit of analysis. Industry cluster benchmarks are pre-defined sets of related sectors that have been identified based on an analysis of interindustry relationships at a geographic scale other than the region under study, usually the nation as a whole. Examples are manufacturing value chain clusters derived by Feser and Bergman (2000) using 1987 national input-output data and Porter’s (2003) a set of geography-based clusters derived from a joint analysis of industry co-location patterns and trading linkages. In this paper, I develop and implement an alternative methodology for identifying benchmark value chain clusters useful for applied regional economic base studies. The approach addresses several key weaknesses in the Feser and Bergman methodology while also updating the value chain benchmarks to the 2002 North American Industry Classification System.
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Globalization, regional economic policy and research
Edward Feser
Latest version: February 17, 2005
Abstract. While the case for increasing the degree of integration in the world economy is strong (e.g., Sen, 1999; Irwin, 2002; Bhagwati, 2004), it is based on the notion of net benefits.1 Workers, industries and places absorb trade-related gains and losses differently and must adjust to greater or lesser degrees to the liberalizing international economic environment. Because of the high degree of industrial specialization and concentration in the space economy, some states and regions’ potential losses are greater than their gains, at least in the short- to medium-run. While the losses seem eminently visible—evidenced in bankruptcies, closed factories, and unemployment lines—the benefits are typically diffuse. It still the case that net gains are not a fait accompli, despite a high degree of confidence in the net positives of trade within mainstream economics (Samuelson, 2004). Moreover, coreperiphery and cumulative causation theories and findings suggest that there are circumstances in which opening regions to import competition can exacerbate regional income inequalities (Venables, 1998; Fujita and Hu, 2001; Meardon, 2001; Hu, 2002; Mansori, 2003).2 The differential regional impacts of globalization are therefore important and need to be fully understood, along with the aggregate economic benefits. Also requiring careful thought is what local strategies, if any, are necessary to maximize the benefits of globalization for regional businesses and workers. In a globalizing world of scarce public sector resources, what is the appropriate subnational economic policy response?
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