ENHANCING RURAL ECONOMIC OPPORTUNITIES, COMMUNITY RESILIENCE, AND ENTREPRENEURSHIP

• Sponsoring Institution: National Institute of Food and Agriculture
• Project Status: COMPLETE
• Funding Source: HATCH
• Reporting Frequency: Annual
• Accession No.: 1014534
• Multistate No.: NE-1749
• Project Start Date: Oct 2, 2017
• Project End Date: Sep 30, 2022
• Program Code: [(N/A)]- (N/A)

Recipient Organization
PURDUE UNIVERSITY
(N/A)
WEST LAFAYETTE,IN 47907

Performing Department
Ag & Biological Engineering

Non Technical Summary
This project will identify the factors that make a rural community more resilient to economic shocks, aging infrastructure and reduced public and private funding.

Animal Health Component

50%

Research Effort Categories

Basic

50%

Applied

50%

Developmental

(N/A)

Classification

Knowledge Area (KA)	Subject of Investigation (SOI)	Field of Science (FOS)	Percent
803	6050	2020	50%
402	5340	2020	50%

Knowledge Area
803 - Sociological and Technological Change Affecting Individuals, Families, and Communities; 402 - Engineering Systems and Equipment;

Subject Of Investigation
5340 - Nonfarm structures and related facilities; 6050 - Communities, areas, and regions;

Field Of Science
2020 - Engineering;

Keywords

community resilience

rural infrastructure

economic shocks

econometric models

Goals / Objectives
2. Evaluating Factors and Policies Affecting the Resiliency of Rural Communities. Many of the natural and human induced “shocks” which impact rural communities are external i.e. communities have little or no control over whether the shock occurs. Examples include major storms (Hurricane Harvey, Superstorm Sandy), restructuring of the tax code or health care system, or State and Federal changes in energy, land, and water use policy. However, there are proactive and reactive mechanisms communities can adopt to minimize negative effects and enhance positive effects of these shocks, and to mitigate effects which do happen. The degree to which a community can bounce back from these changes is a measure of resiliency. Proposed and ongoing research areas under this objective are discussed in the comments section. 1. objective are:

a. Impacts of federal infrastructure investment plans. Funding mechanisms for proposed infrastructure upgrades and expansion are not yet determined and may be quite different from historical funding efforts and effects on tax bases (Deller, Amiel, Stallmann, and Maher, 2013a; Janeski and Whitacre, 2014).
b. Changes in health care availability due to changes in the Affordable Care Act and possible new health care legislation. Many rural counties currently have few or no health care providers, and often suffer from substance abuse issues (Henning-Smith and Kozhimannil, 2016; Skidmore et al. 2014). The disproportionate representation of veterans in rural areas presents both problems and opportunities; veterans may require health care and counseling services difficult to find in rural areas.
c. Why are some areas lagging in recovering from the recession (Stephens, H., Partridge, and Faggian, 2013; Stephens and Partridge, 2011)? What did we learn from the recession? What policies aided resilience and recovery (Deller and Watson, 2016)? There is movement away from extractive industries to retirement/tourism based economies in rural areas, a trend partially offset with opposite effects in, for example, fracking areas; how will this effect community resilience in the face of future shocks? What contexts increase the likelihood a rural community will benefit from retirement-, tourism-, or recreation-based economies as they consider moving away from extractive industries (Hill et al. 2014; Lim, 2016)?
d. The impact of changes in federal policies affect land and water use in rural areas (Chen and Weber, 2012). For example, transfer of ownership of federal lands from federal to state government has been proposed, which might affect income, employment, and taxation at the local/state level. Other issues include changes in public land policy and forest resource management.
e. Understanding the Impacts of changes in the retirement system. For example, the current generation of retirees is the first to experience a shift from traditional pension plans to personal retirement accounts, with implications for intergenerational wealth transfer.
f. Understanding the impact of policies regarding climate change and efforts to support alternative forms of energy on rural areas. What impacts does the renewable energy sector have on rural jobs, income, and household and community well-being? Are some locations better equipped with transport infrastructure, land and forest resources, and human and social capital to support the expansion of this emerging sector? What is the effect of clean energy development on rural counties? Increased focus on sources of renewable energy has raised questions of aesthetic damages, issues of regional vs. local energy, and storage capacity for solar generation. How can rural areas participate?
g. Understanding the impact of policies geared at reinvigorating or encouraging fossil fuels on rural areas. How do rural residents value this development which brings jobs but also can damage natural resources and affect long-term amenity-led growth?
h. Considering the interplay between traditional sources of energy and renewables. How do higher oil prices factor in? How do the interaction between weather and output in solar power link into/with “traditional” energy suppliers? For example, much of the coal fired power of eastern Montana which went to Seattle has been supplanted by other sources. What are the local/regional effects of renewable energy pipelines, powerlines, and other energy infrastructure requirements (Coon et al. 2015; Fortenbery, Deller, and Amiel, 2013)?

Project Methods
This project will investigate the economic resilience of communities and the role of transportation infrastructure with a particular focus in rural areas. To achieve this, this project will develop indicators of economic development and economic resilience and then estimate empirical models that are able to capture the relationship between transportation infrastructure and economic activity using spatial econometric techniques.

Progress 10/01/19 to 09/30/20

Outputs
Target Audience:Outreach to the scientific community, the policy community, economic development organizations and local citizens anddecision makers. Two journal paper related to this work and one conference presentation were disseminated to communities of interest. Changes/Problems:Covid-19 pandemic impacts to accessing facilities, students and othe resources. What opportunities for training and professional development has the project provided? Nothing Reported How have the results been disseminated to communities of interest?Two journal papers related to this work and one conference presentation were disseminated to communities of interest.Those are listed below: Chacón-Hurtado, D., I. Kumar, K. Gkritza, J. Fricker, L. Beaulieu, "The Role of Transportation Accessibility in Regional Economic Resilience," Journal of Transport Geography 84, (2020). Chacón-Hurtado, D., , 36(6), (2020). Chacón-Hurtado, D., I. Kumar, K. Gkritza, and J. Fricker, "Exploring a Measure of Commuting Burden for Low-income Workers in Indiana using CTPP Data," TRB 99th Annual Meeting, January 12-15, Washington, D.C. (2020). What do you plan to do during the next reporting period to accomplish the goals? Continue the work on idientifying the factors that make a rural community more resilient to economic shocks. Continue the work related to rural health outcomes as a function of transportation supply and demand variables. Investigate cost-effective strategies in rural areas to enhance mobility and health outcomes, that could ultimately inform policies and programs addressing health, mobility issues, and equity concerns. Investigate how new transportation technologies could be implemented and easily deployed in rural communities in orderto bridge the mobility gap between urban and rural areas

Impacts
What was accomplished under these goals? The project team has adopted a community capitals-based framework and a structural equation modeling strategy to assess the economic resilience of the regions. The capitals include infrastructure, built environment, financial capital, human capital, social and political capital, respectively. We have gathered data for various indicators and variables for 2011 to 2018. Note that the data are being collected for 258 counties that fall within a 180-minute driving distance from the two regions. Similarly, the SEM focuses on uncovering parameters of economic resilience post Great Recession (2008-2009). It is generally agreed that in 2011 and onwards, regions were in recovery mode following the Great Recession. The data collection for a few indicators and variables in social and political capital is in progress. This includes additional data on social infrastructure, funding and investments in non-profits, voter participation, etc. The data are collected from various proprietary and public sources including Economic Modeling Specialists International (EMSI), U.S. Census Bureau, U.S. Geological Survey, Environmental Protection Agency, and the U.S. Bureau of Transportation Statistics. As the research makes progress, the project team may have to gather additional variables. We have started conceptualizing the relationships between variables that can be measured and latent concepts that are hard to measure but can affect economic resilience of the regions.

Publications

• Type: Journal Articles Status: Published Year Published: 2020 Citation: Chac�nHurtado, D., I. Kumar, K. Gkritza, J. Fricker, L. Beaulieu, The Role of Transportation Accessibility in Regional Economic Resilience, Journal of Transport Geography 84 (2020).
• Type: Journal Articles Status: Published Year Published: 2020 Citation: Chac�nHurtado, D., Losada Rojas, L.L., K. Gkritza, J. Fricker, D. Yu, A Proposed Framework for the Incorporation of Economic Resilience into Transportation Decision Making, ASCE Journal of Management in Engineering, 36(6), (2020).

Progress 10/01/18 to 09/30/19

Outputs
Target Audience:Outreach to the scientific community, the policy community, economic development organizations and local citizens and decision makers. One journal paper related to this work and two conference presentations were disseminated to communities of interest. Changes/Problems: Nothing Reported What opportunities for training and professional development has the project provided? Nothing Reported How have the results been disseminated to communities of interest?Two journal papers related to this work (one under review) and three conference presentations were disseminated to communities of interest. Those are listed below: Losada-Rojas L.L. & Gkritza K. The Nexus between Rural Health and Transportation: Current Trends and Future Directions. NARSC 2018, San Antonio, TX, November 2018. Davis Chacon-Hurtado, Indraneel Kumar, Konstantina Gkritza & Jon D. Analysis of Spatial Mismatch and Equity Using Commuting and Labor Sheds: Trends in Indiana. TRB Annual meeting, Washington D.C. January 2019. Later published in Transportation Research Record, Journal of the Transportation Research Board. Davis Chacon-Hurtado, Indraneel Kumar, Konstantina Gkritza & Jon D. Fricker Accessibility to Diversity of Jobs in Indiana NARSC 2019, Pittsburgh, November 2018. Chacón-Hurtado, D., I. Kumar, K. Gkritza, J. Fricker, L. Beaulieu, "The Role of Transportation Accessibility in Regional Economic Resilience," Journal of Transport Geography (under review). What do you plan to do during the next reporting period to accomplish the goals? Continue the work on idientifying the factors that make a rural community more resilient to economic shocks. Continue the work related to rural health outcomes as a function of transportation supply and demand variables. Investigate cost-effective strategies in rural areas to enhance mobility and health outcomes, that could ultimately inform policies and programs addressing health, mobility issues, and equity concerns. Investigate how new transportation technologies could be implemented and easily deployed in rural communities in order to bridge the mobility gap between urban and rural areas.

Impacts
What was accomplished under these goals? 1) We examined transportation's role on regional economic resilience using stakeholder-driven data in structural equation models (SEM). Stakeholders' and experts' opinions are critical to the planning of transportation projects. Because getting input from stakeholders can be challenging, new methods are used to collect and analyze their input. We estimated SEM to answer a set of complex, multi-faceted, and important questions for regional economic development that have long gone unanswered. In answering the question on the role of transportation in regional economic resilience, stakeholders, primarily from transportation agencies and regional planning organizations were first asked to identify the primary socioeconomic and infrastructure components and possible relationships the components had with regional economic resilience. Their responses were then used to construct a preliminary model. Afterwards, an SEM model was fine-tuned using county-level data from multiple sources. In this way, the SEM accounts for stakeholders' opinions (analogous to stated preferences) while being data-driven (analogous to revealed preferences). A case study in Indiana indicates that, while transportation accessibility does not directly affect the response variable (total employment), it has a positive and significant effect on industrial diversity, which in turn has a weakly significant and positive effect on total employment. These results may be useful to planners who are interested in the role and paths of transportation and regional economic resilience. 2) We examined he current trends on rural mobility and its relationship with rural health and physical activity levels based on the 2017 National Household Travel Survey (NHTS). The 2017 NHTS was collected between April 2016 and May 2017 by the Federal Highway Administration and was released in Spring 2018. The 2017 NHTS recorded 29,180 rural household samples. The 2017 NHTS data includes information not only on individual and household travel behavior and socio-economic characteristics across the nation (information that was collected in the 2001 and 2009 surveys as well) but also includes new questions on individuals' attitudes and beliefs, walking and biking, and questions related to general health measures and physical activity levels. We developed econometric models that show to what extent health and physical activity levels affect travel demand in rural areas, measured as person miles traveled. The model results suggest that respondents who are young, work full time, use transit to go to work, use car/ride-sharing frequently and stated that the walking infrastructure is deifcient are less likely to walk frequently. People who reported to commute usinf non-motorized transportation modes, bike frequently, use public transportation are more likely to make more walking trips during their week. In geenral, rural respondents reported tto walk significantly less for exercise than their urban counterparts. However, rural respondents reported to bike more for exercise than their rural counterparts.

Publications

• Type: Journal Articles Status: Published Year Published: 2019 Citation: Chac�nHurtado, D., I. Kumar, K. Gkritza, and J. Fricker, Analysis of Spatial Mismatch and Equity Using Commuting and Labor Sheds: Trends in Indiana, Transportation Research Record, Journal of the Transportation Research Board (available online June 2, 2019, https://doi.org/10.1177/0361198119849919.
• Type: Journal Articles Status: Under Review Year Published: 2019 Citation: Chac�nHurtado, D., I. Kumar, K. Gkritza, J. Fricker, L. Beaulieu, The Role of Transportation Accessibility in Regional Economic Resilience, Journal of Transport Geography (under review).

Progress 10/02/17 to 09/30/18

Outputs
Target Audience:Outreach to the scientific community, the policy community, economic development organizations and local citizens and decision makers. Three presentations delivered and three journal articles in preparation. Changes/Problems: Nothing Reported What opportunities for training and professional development has the project provided? Nothing Reported How have the results been disseminated to communities of interest?Conference presentations at the TRB Annual meeting, NARSC Annual Meeting, and the5th Annual Summer Conference on Livable Communities. What do you plan to do during the next reporting period to accomplish the goals?Publish a paper on regional economic resilience in ruralareas and the impacts of the recession on their ability to recover. Explore the factors that make a rural community more resilient to economic shocks, aging infrastructure and reduced public and private funding. Continue the work related to rural health outcomes as a function of transportation supply and demand variables. Invetsigate cost-effective strategies in rural areas to enhance mobility and health outcomes, that could ultimately inform policies and programs addressing health, mobility issues, and equity concerns.

Impacts
What was accomplished under these goals? 1) Evaluated the factrors affecting economic resiliency in rural Indiana. In specific, we proposed a framework in which different transportation-related variables (such as highway and rail density) and transportation-derived measures (such as accessibility) are evaluated in terms of their association with a measure of resilience to economic shocks at the county level. As part of this work, i) we developed a metric of economic resilience that considers the local competitiveness only and does not require the definition of a pre-shock equilibrium state; ii) evaluated the interdependencies between transportation accessibility and spatial location industry activity, commuting patterns by income groups, and regional performance in Indiana during the recession, using three case studies, and iii) developed econometric models to evaluate the association between the transportation-related variables and the other seven components of economic resilience with the regional performance of regions, while explicitly considering their spatial interactions. A global model, based on a spatial autoregressive model with autoregressive disturbances (SARAR), and a local model, based on a Geographically Weighted Regression (GWR) were estimated using data for six states of the U.S. Great Lakes Region during the last Great Recession. The estimation results showed that transportation-related variables, such as proximity to industrial parks, proximity to intermodal facilities, low commuting times, and distance to work, are strongly associated with the spatial economic structure and interactions in Indiana. After controlling for other factors such as human capital, industrial structure, and metropolitan location, the association between transportation accessibility and the regional economic resilience was positive and significant. In specific, the SARAR results showed that the global relationships between distance to interstate highways, distance to rail stations (Class I railways), and accessibility to labor, were positively associated with regional performance during or after the recession. Nonetheless, the local spatial analysis shows that the association between these variables and the regional performance varied significantly across space. 2) A study on the nexus between active travel behavior and rural health outcomes. The lack of reliable, affordable, and convenient transportation services in rural areas affects health in a number of ways. For instance, the lack of transportation does limit the access to health care itself but also access to jobs and economic sustainability, which can in turn affect health. Rural residents rely more on private vehicles than their urban counterparts do because their average trip distances are usually longer. In the era of shared mobility, that dependency can be addressed by providing ridesharing services in rural areas as another transportation option. However, there are notorious differences between rural and urban areas which need to be understood in order to improve health and well-being and decrease health disparities across geographical locations. We prepared a summary of the current trends on rural mobility and its relationship with rural health and physical activity levels based on the 2017 National Household Travel Survey (NHTS). The 2017 NHTS was collected between April 2016 and May 2017 by the Federal Highway Administration and was released in Spring 2018. The 2017 NHTS recorded 29,180 rural household samples. The 2017 NHTS data includes information not only on individual and household travel behavior and socio-economic characteristics across the nation (information that was collected in the 2001 and 2009 surveys as well) but also includes new questions on individuals' attitudes and beliefs, walking and biking, and questions related to general health measures and physical activity levels.

Publications