Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

In a region that continues to be highly dependent upon federal spending (Gatrell & Calzonetti, 2003), public money matters.The contention that free market forces in and of themselves are sufficient to lift lagging regions out of poverty has gained great currency over the past two decades. Efficiency-enhancing measures and infrastructure investments have helped some Appalachian communities but not others. The abrupt reversal of declining income inequities between metro and nonmetro counties in the 1980s suggests that both income maintenance and investments in economic efficiency remain necessary for many rural Appalachian counties. In Central Appalachia, despite significant infrastructure investments, many communities still lack basic “nuts-and-bolts” infrastructure such as sewer and water systems. Continued federal involvement and income maintenance for rural counties are difficult propositions to advance in the current policy climate but appear to remain vital tools for the reduction of currently increasing subregional and metro/nonmetro economic differentials.

In this chapter, we have discussed the role of geographic space in quantitative demography. A re-emerging interest in spatial demography is evidenced by an increasing number of demographers seeking to adopt the formal tools of spatial econometrics to improve on traditional regression models of demographic processes operating in space. The concept of spatial autocorrelation and ways to specify correctly multiple regression models in the presence of spatial autocorrelation are made more concrete through an illustration of spatial modeling of county-level growth in the U.S. Great Plains region during the 1990s. It is our belief that we will have moved the science of spatial demography forward in very exciting ways as our own statistical models become more sophisticated, as spatial processes are brought into empirical demographic studies to correct for potential misspecification, and as ourwork begins to add significantly to the larger literature on spatial data analysis. The growing interest in the field of spatial econometrics among several disciplines in the social sciences, of which the re-emergence of interest in spatial demography is a part, suggests an exciting future for quantitative demographers.