Rural Development Implications One Year After COVID
The COVID-19 pandemic has had far-reaching impacts on most sectors of the U.S. economy, and these impacts have been uneven across rural and urban areas. On the one hand, rural areas were already lagging behind urban areas in many sectors before the pandemic (Ajilore and Willingham, 2019; U.S. Department of Agriculture, 2018), including in terms of educational attainment, access to health care and broadband, and general economic progress (e.g., Dobis et al. 2020; Goetz, Partridge, and Stephens, 2018). On the other hand, lower rural population density and greater reliance on personal as opposed to public transportation likely reduced the rural populations’ exposure to the virus (Goetz et al., 2020). This special theme issue of Choices was commissioned by the Council on Food, Agriculture and Resource Economics (C-FARE) to examine how COVID-19 affected rural areas and prepared in collaboration with the Northeast Regional Center for Rural Development on behalf of the Regional Rural Development Centers (RRDCs).
Authors: Stephan J. Goetz, Jane Kolodinsky
Publication: Choices Magazine Date Published: April 1, 2021