Abstract
The rural United States has suffered long-term population decline over the past several decades, especially in farming communities. In recent years, biofuel production has been argued to hold potential for the revitalization of rural America and in response, many rural communities have eagerly attempted to attract ethanol plants as a local development effort. This study conceptualizes economic revitalization in terms of population dynamics and investigates whether the establishment of a biofuel plant has been associated with changes in population aging, natural increase, and/or migration trends in the West North Central United States, the location of the majority of the nation’s biofuel plants. Using path dependence as a conceptual framework and aggregate statistics from a variety of sources, results from spatial regression models indicate that despite initial expectations, ethanol plants have no association with the demographic trajectories of rural counties.
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Notes
http://lugar.senate.gov/press/record.cfm?id=296372 accessed on December 5, 2008.
If there is no opportunity to sell the grain to a feedlot nearby, the plant needs to either ship it an end user or dispose it. Both are expensive practices, so plants are looking for feedlots nearby when deciding about the location. Evidence from Kansas suggests that for some plants it is a lifeline, allowing them to make enough money on distiller’s grain to turn the plan profitable.
The first biofuel plant opened in the study region in 1985.
Ten additional biofuel plants were located in metropolitan counties, and thus were excluded from the analysis.
We initially planned to include a variable for service employment, but the NAICS code system does not lend itself to the creation of a meaningful overall measure. We did attempt various models using different sub sectors of services, but the missing data issues far outweighed any statistical benefits to the analysis.
According to the ERS definition, farming dependence indicates that farm earnings account for an annual average of 15 percent or more of total county earnings during 1998–2000 or farm occupations account for 15 percent or more of all occupations in 2000.
According to the ERS definition, a manufacturing dependent county has 25 percent or more of average annual labor and proprietors' earnings derived from manufacturing during 1998–2000.
The exception were net migration rates, which were not spatially correlated in a univariate Moran’s I test, but were when applying Langrange multiplier tests to the full regression models.
The spatial error model helps to correct for the autocorrelation that would normally exist between the errors of the predicted values. If left unchecked, this spatial autocorrelation would violate the assumptions of the regression equation.
The exception was average business size for which we had data for 2005 only.
As we have already demonstrated, urbanized areas in these non-metropolitan counties tend to be younger overall. We know that migration is age-selective for younger adults. If these larger towns have a large number of young adults, while still struggling with the relative lack of employment opportunities (compared to their more urban metropolitan counterparts), they may be suffering from a statistically exaggerated form of the outmigration that regularly occurs in the nonmetropolitan counties in the area.
This is based on the mean percentage of employment in farming occupations for a central county and its spatially contiguous neighbors. Using the same rule, the central square on a chess board would average the values of nine squares (the central square and each of its eight neighbors).
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Kulcsár, L.J., Bolender, B.C. If you build it, will they come? Biofuel plants and demographic trends in the Midwest. Popul Environ 32, 318–331 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11111-010-0122-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11111-010-0122-0