Building Community Visions of Assets, Competitiveness, & Partnerships: A State’s Role in Rural Economic Development

The increasingly rapid changes in the world mar-ketplace are having significant effects on all regional economies, creating both challenges and opportuni-ties. The challenges for rural economies have been es-pecially pronounced. Rural economies rely on low land and labor prices for their competitiveness, with commodity agriculture and manufacturing as their economic foundations. Globalization is introducing the possibility of much lower input costs for commod-ity production, leading to a steadily deteriorating competitive position for these traditional rural indus-tries. Agriculture continues this transition after a par-ticularly sharp series of contractions in the 1980’s; ru-ral manufacturing plants are arguably going through their most difficult transition phase. Neither can be th