The authors of this paper share a common background from the Northern Norway region, a rural county and the largest and least populated county of Norway. The region is characterised by high out-migration, lower educational levels, and higher drop-out rates from secondary education than in other regions of Norway. Limited educational provision…

The authors of this report aim to understand the health of the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education and labor market in the Appalachia region -- defined as the intersection of Ohio, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia -- with a focus on the mining and extraction industry. This report is the third in a three-part series.…

Institutions of higher education prepare and develop students for the workforce, and in the coming decade, the challenge of workforce preparation will increase as the current workforce is retiring during a time of economic growth. Traditional higher education practice tasks faculty with developing appropriate curricula for students that will…

The combination of two technological tools, Microsoft Excel and ArcGIS, has proved powerful in organizing, categorizing, and expressing data visually in meaningful ways. The use of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) has found its way into historical research due to its interdisciplinary nature and usefulness. The goal of this paper is not to…

This second of five annual reports focuses on employment and wages in energy and advanced manufacturing-related industries and on science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education indicators in the Appalachia Partnership Initiative (API) region, comprising twenty-seven counties in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia. Together,…

This first of five annual reports focuses on employment and wages in energy and advanced manufacturing--related industries and on science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education indicators in the Appalachia Partnership Initiative (API) region. Together, these reports will capture trends over the next four years to (1) inform the…

Non-industrial private forest (NIPF) landowners are often not included in discussions of emerging woody biomass markets for energy, yet they will likely be principal suppliers of the resource. Surveys administered to 475 forest landowners before and after an Extension Forestry education program in 10 counties across North Carolina indicated that…

This article examines the spatial distribution of income inequality and the socioeconomic factors affecting it using spatial analysis techniques across 16,285 block groups, 5,050 tracts, and 618 counties in the western part of the North Central Region of the United States. Different geographic aggregations result in different inequality outcomes,…

Purpose: Environmental hazards are unevenly distributed across communities and populations; however, little is known about the distribution of environmental carcinogenic pollutants and lung cancer risk across populations defined by race, sex, and rural-urban setting. Methods: We used the Toxics Release Inventory (TRI) database to conduct an…

This paper examines whether state governments perform systematically less environmental enforcement of facilities in communities with higher minority and low-income populations. Although this is an important claim made by environmental justice advocates, it has received little attention in the scholarly literature. Specifically, I analyze state…

In the 1990s, studies have documented widespread growth of immigrants in U.S. communities not known as common destinations in the past. This trend has fueled population growth in some nonmetropolitan areas and offset population decline in other areas. In this paper, we examine the implications of recent foreign born in-migration for rural America.…

Pennsylvania, like the United States, experienced a remarkable economic expansion through the late 1990s. The significant growth and change of this decade, however, did not equally touch all regions and all industries. Traditional sectors continued to decline, while growth in what has been dubbed the "new economy," considered to be the…

This article describes a collaborative project between business and industry, local school systems and Jacksonville State University (Jacksonville, Alabama). This project resulted in a new education and business/industry partnership called Readiness Education for Achieving Career Heights (REACH). The Calhoun County Chamber of Commerce saw a need…

The acquisition of skills that match job requirements has become an issue in human resource development. A uniform but vague list of desirable skills often provided by policymakers or advocated by scholars is used as a guide in education and training programs in China. Using survey data, this study analyzes the core skills that workforces in China…

In this report, subnational economic data by industry, including Educational Services, is provided. County Business Patterns is useful for studying the economic activity of small areas; analyzing economic changes over time; and as a benchmark for statistical series, surveys, and databases between economic censuses. The number of establishments,…