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Large and sudden migrations occurred at many stages in human history, but the combination of increased longevity, declining fertility rates, and aging of populations have no counterpart. Although much longer in the making—modern urbanization began in the late eighteenth century in England—the degree of global urbanization, which passed the 50% mark only around 2010, is also without historical precedent and has not yet run its course. Because of these changes, today migration is a major driver of demographic change in developed as well as in developing economies. The most dramatic new migrations are responses to changes in economic, social, political, and environmental conditions and are continuously evolving and often rapidly changing. In this chapter, we argue that this type of migration should be a research priority for the next half century.

Undocumented migration is a (inferior) substitute to documented migration. Hence, policies affecting documented migration also affect undocumented migration. This paper explores this relationship from a theoretical perspective. The implications of this exploration are that lax enforcement of visa rules and national borders, combined with a very long waiting line (small annual quotas) for immigrant visas, can make illegal immigration a preferred option over legal immigration or, more generally, that for policy purposes all types of migrations should be regarded as interdependent. Therefore, policies aimed solely at, say, undocumented immigration will generally be less effective than an integrated policy approach.

Appalachia remains a symbol of poverty in the midst of prosperity. During the 1990s it fell further behind the rest of the nation. Persistent poverty during a period of strong growth is a serious as well as an interesting subject to study. We examine determinants of growth in Appalachia between 1990 and 2000. We show that employment, migration, and median household income were jointly determined by regional covariates and that county economic conditions were conditional on the performance in neighboring counties. One conclusion is that regional cooperation and geographically focused programs may yield the greatest returns to policy investments.

Migration movements to industrialized countries have grown in number and size, and the presence of large numbers of immigrants has raised concerns about their integration and assimilation into host societies. This article is an empirical study of assimilation of foreign nationals in Germany. Their experience may hold lessons for other relatively recent immigration destinations. As expected, language is one of the most critical factors for determining integration and assimilation at the workplace and in society. Our results indicate uneven success in these two areas, and suggest that greater language skills may be required for social assimilation, compared to economic assimilation. Among the most important findings of our study are the strong and statistically significant effects of the attitudes by Germans toward immigrants, the significant influence of the region of residence, and the ambivalence of German-born foreign residents toward naturalization and continued stay. This signals the failure of past integration and assimilation policies. The results show that negative attitudes by ethnic Germans against others at work or in society, in general, reduce interest in integration and assimilation. This is neither new nor surprising and this research does not contribute new theoretical insights, but it demonstrates the magnitude and significance of the effects. The question of why different locations seemed to have different impacts on citizenship aspirations is beyond the scope of this article. The data do not provide information to pursue this question and we suspect that the causes are too complex for a short answer. As expected, non-EU citizens showed greater interest in acquiring German citizenship than EU citizens. Finally, the results also indicate that the immediate post-World War II notion of “guest workers” was not completely false. There has been significant return migration and a significant number of respondents to the survey say that they intend to return.

Entrepreneurship is now recognized as a strategy to achieve economic growth in many regions. The goal of this paper is to increase the understanding of entrepreneurship's contributions to economic growth and its potential as a development strategy for a region, such as Appalachia, characterized by poverty and underdevelopment. Using data on Appalachian counties, a system of simultaneous equations is empirically estimated to measure the effects of entrepreneurship on economic growth and development. An expanded Carlino-Mills growth model is used where changes in population, employment and per capita income represent measures of growth. Proprietorship and firm formation rate data are used to measure entrepreneurial activity. The results show start-up businesses contribute significantly to determining population growth. Employment growth is positively affected by self-employment rates as well as by firm formation rates. In terms of policy implications, the paper recommends the creation of an environment to encourage entrepreneurial activity as a strategy to battle unemployment. It concludes that regional policy makers need to renew their efforts to support the growth of self-employment and sustain the existing firms.

Regional scientists, with their experience investigating social and economic phenomena at different levels of aggregation, awareness of the importance of the role public and private institutions in society, and interdisciplinary tool box, are particularly well suited to provide rural policy advice to state and local governments. In spite of this, there are those who argue that faculty neglect state rural policy (SRP) research. This article explores this question and ties answers and recommendations to incentives faced by faculty and their institutions.

The incorporation of economic thinking into the valuation of landscapes is still relatively new. It is an approach that yields valuable new insights and can help with prioritizing the use of scarce resources to improve and/or preserve landscapes. This paper explores and discusses the uses and limitations of economic valuation of landscapes from market failure, policy process, and theoretical and philosophical perspectives.

This paper attempts to investigate further the nonlinear feedback relationship found in Kyrtsou and Labys (2006) between US inflation (BLS CPI) and primary commodity price index (the BLS PPI component for all primary commodity series). Our goal is to disaggregate the above index to the individual commodity level for a group of raw materials prices, including crude oil. Assuming the hypothesis that a non-linear feedback relationship exists between US inflation and the commodity price index, we examine if individual primary commodity prices also nonlinearly causes inflation and vice-versa. We also improve upon our previous research by employing a new test for non-linear feedback causality recently developed by Hristu-Varsakelis and Kyrtsou (2006). Our results suggest the presence of non-linear interdependences between inflation and the various commodity price series, and particularly bi-directionality in the case of crude oil.

This paper examines the relationship between quality of life, health and several socioeconomic variables. The analysis utilizes empirical data obtained from a survey questionnaire administered on a random sample of over 2000 residents in twenty-one counties in West Virginia, and spatial data obtained by geocoding the survey respondents' addressees. Quality of life is measured by a three-point categorical measure of overall satisfaction and an ordered probit model is used to examine the relationships. The empirical results are consistent with the theoretical predictions and indicate, for instance, that quality of life satisfaction increases with income and education while it decreases with unemployment.

Significant ethnic minority business growth has occurred in the United States in the post-World War II period. The self-employment pattern of ethnic minority business, particularly the success of Asian-immigrant small business, is currently explained by two different hypotheses: the social resources explanation and the class resources explanation. While the former approach attributes the large number of small business enterprises and their success to the existence of such social resources as rotating credit associations, a protected market, and a labor source within Asian American communities, the latter argues that success instead is caused by greater investment of human and financial capital by these immigrants. The present study compares the self-employment pattern of the restaurant industry operated by African Americans and immigrant Chinese in Denver. Contrasts and similarities in ownership characteristics, start-up capital, location, soical networks, and economic significance prompted this study to ...

When job prospects are uncertain, labor market size matters even when labor and jobs, respectively, are homogenous. The expected time to employment and its standard deviation may differ systematically with labor market size and create incentives for agglomeration.

Although we generally teach economics as if markets formed a perfect system, in reality, there are many instances of partial and complete market failure in the real economy. Imperfections complicate models and analyses. Therefore, it is better to first introduce students to the model of the ideal-typical perfect system. In addition, in many circumstances, equilibrium and partial equilibrium models derived from the ideal-typical system have yielded good insights and results. However, ignoring imperfections carries several costs, including neglect of the role of institutions, and probably too much confidence in the self-correcting power of markets by policy makers.

Over the last 50 years many OECD countries have attracted large numbers of foreign immigrants. Faced with record inflows, increasingly from non-western countries, even traditional immigrant countries, such as the USA, are worried about their abilities to integrate the newcomers and are re-examining their immigration policies. This paper uses high quality data sets of five major immigrant groups in Germany to study how immigrants’ attitudes toward immigration may have changed over the last thirty years. This is particularly interesting time period, because it coincides with significant political change in Western Europe, culminating so far with the creation of the European Union and European citizenship for citizens of member countries.

Positive self-selection has been used to explain the superior economic performance of some immigrant groups. Even if immigrants and natives are identical, however, the former face different incentives. In particular, they bear costs not incurred by natives, including monetary costs of moving, costs of staying in touch with family, and obligations to those left behind. Nonmonetary costs include stress and loss of location specific human capital. The focus of this paper is on how these costs influence the decisions of immigrants relative to those of natives. Particular attention is given to the role of assimilation. Copyright 1995 by Economics Department of the University of Pennsylvania and the Osaka University Institute of Social and Economic Research Association.

Relatively little is known about the long-run behavior of international labor migrations. One of the biggest concerns in immigration debates relates to the continued pressure on the borders of the wealthy countries. This immigration pressure will decline significantly only if the poor nations manage to provide more high-wage jobs. An earlier model of international labor migration is used to derive additional insights into the growth and decline of labor supply in different labor markets resulting from migration. Particular attention is paid to labor demand growth requirements in a sending country so that out-migration will slow down and eventually stop.