The rural growth trifecta: outdoor amenities, creative class and entrepreneurial context

By D. McGranahan, Timothy R. Wojan, Dayton M. Lambert. 2011

316 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Recent work challenges the notion that attracting creative workers to a place is sufficient for generating local economic growth. In this article, we examine the problem of sustaining robust growth in the periphery of the USA, demonstrating the contingent nature of talent as an engine for economic growth. We test the hypothesis that rural growth in the knowledge economy is dependent on the ability to utilize new knowledge, perhaps generated elsewhere, in addressing local economic challenges. Tests confirm that the interaction of entrepreneurial context with the share of the workforce employed in the creative class is strongly associated with growth in the number of new establishments and employment, particularly in those rural counties endowed with attractive outdoor amenities.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Sociology and Political Science, Urban Studies

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/879bebda2b30d1d169da4b811d8f6c0dba801f18

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Citations in the corpus

Does rural broadband impact jobs and income? Evidence from spatial and first-differenced regressions (2014, background): “Recent studies (Stephens and Partridge 2011; McGranahan et al. 2011; Goetz et al. 2012) point to income levels, the number of businesses, total employment levels, and the percentage of self-employed (i.e., nonfarm proprietors) as important measures of rural economic health.”
Rural entrepreneurship and migration (2019, background): “Despite a growing emphasis on rural entrepreneurship, the true ability of entrepreneurial development efforts to stimulate consistent rural growth remains unclear (Rowe et al., 1999; Stockdale, 2006; McGranahan et al., 2011).”
INNOVATION, ENTREPRENEURSHIP AND ECONOMIC GROWTH IN LAGGING REGIONS (2013, unknown): “…low labor and land costs, rural Appalachian counties may have an abundance of natural amenities that may be particularly attractive for the creative and university-educated workers needed to manage such facilities (McGranahan and Wojan, 2007; Partridge et al., 2008b; McGranahan et al., 2010).”
Entrepreneurship Within Urban and Rural Areas: Creative People and Social Networks (2014, background): “Even though critics of the creative class are ‘ad infinitum’ (SCOTT, 2006), the concept has many interesting notions for entrepreneurship (BOSCHMA and FRITSCH, 2009), even in rural areas (MCGRANAHAN et al., 2010).”
Location determinants of high-growth firms (2015, background): “…may allow outdoor amenities, for example, to become potentially important determinants of firm locations that firms need to attract key workers (McGranahan, Wojan, and Lambert 2010). the relative importance of the competing mechanisms described above will be different in urban vs. rural areas.”
Ex post analysis of economic impacts from wind power development in U.S. counties (2012, background): “††† Since the literature is unclear on what specific natural amenities matter the most (McGranahan et al., 2011), a natural amenities scale was selected for the present analysis (USDA ERS, 2004).”
What is Smart Rural Development (2015, unknown): “Some of them might, for example, have a potential to achieve smart specialization through exploiting local amenities (Dissart and Marcouiller, 2012), developing creative economies (McGranahan et al., 2011) and other resources to build specialized links to urban supply and demand.”