Abstract
When I started to think about the topic of this paper/talk, I sat down with some colleagues and threw out a few general ideas to get their reactions. I envisioned days devoted to reading and hours thinking profound thoughts as I prepared it. I do not know why I had this fantasy. Long ago I learned that days devoted to reading are a luxury; something that surprises friends and family who are not professors. But I found my thoughts turning more to the everyday than the profound. As a result, this is a more personal view of regional science, which draws on my experiences and my training in both institutional economics and regional economics. I will start with some of those experiences and the questions they raised for me about the importance of institutions in regional development and some of the difficulties of doing comparative regional research. While I include regions at many levels of aggregation, my particular interest is how to incorporate institutions into the analysis of regional differences in economic development. I want to explore what literature and methods are out there that can provide insights into better ways of incorporating institutions into comparative regional research.
Highlights
I found my thoughts turning more to the everyday than the profound
The International Comparative Rural Policy Studies (ICRPS) Program is a consortium of about ten universities from the U.S, Canada and Europe
I work for the Cooperative Extension Service where we are asked to identify best practices
Summary
The International Comparative Rural Policy Studies (ICRPS) Program is a consortium of about ten universities from the U.S, Canada and Europe. (I learn all sorts of new acronyms and jargon.) I get to have discussions with graduate students and policy professionals from about 15 different countries each year who are intellectually curious and just plain fun to be around. I get to go to a different country every year and be immersed in some policy issue as well as learning more generally about the history, culture and institutions of the country. We are so sure that ―bald‖ is not natural that the naturally bald summits in the southern Appalachians (White, 2006) for many years were considered ―not natural.‖ I am aware of one version of concern for maintaining the view in the U.S When the Blue Ridge Parkway was built in the 1930s, the hills of Virginia had been denuded. Whereas in the U.S, the denuding of hills is more recent—we have written descriptions of the wooded hills and in many cases we have photographs of the hills with trees
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