摘要：The increasingly rapid changes in the world marketplace
are having significant effects on all regional
economies, creating both challenges and opportunities.
The challenges for rural economies have been especially
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 commodity
production, leading to a steadily deteriorating
competitive position for these traditional rural industries.
Agriculture continues this transition after a particularly
sharp series of contractions in the 1980’s; rural
manufacturing plants are arguably going through
their most difficult transition phase. Neither can be the
easy, natural, longer-term economic foundation for the
rural economy in the future.
