Demography, Population, and Ecology Commons^™

Mountain Monitor-3rd Quarter 2012, Mark Muro, Kenan Fikri

Mountain Monitor Quarterly

The major metropolitan areas of the Intermountain West finally put the housing bust behind them in the third quarter of 2012 and in most places made solid progress. House prices rose in all 10 major metropolitan markets in the months from June to September for the first time since the recession began. Likewise, output growth accelerated and the unemployment rate continued to fall. Unfortunately none of this prevented the region’s already feeble jobs recovery from slowing.

Mountain Monitor-2nd Quarter 2012, Mark Muro, Kenan Fikri

Mountain Monitor Quarterly

Data for the second quarter of 2012 reveal that the large metropolitan areas of the Mountain region were undergoing some of both the strongest and weakest economic recoveries in the nation—even as the pace of recovery across the region as a whole slackened. The result is a new geography. Crash-blasted Boise and Phoenix, along with Utah’s metropolitan areas, are now recovering relatively strongly while Colorado’s metropolitan areas and Albuquerque, Las Vegas, and Tucson struggle.

Mountain Monitor-1st Quarter 2012, Mark Muro, Kenan Fikri

Mountain Monitor Quarterly

For three years now the Mountain Monitor — Brookings Mountain West’s Mountain Zone variant of Brookings’ MetroMonitor — has been tracking the region’s protracted, in-most-places anemic, economic recovery. Quarter-to-quarter, the Monitor has reported on a slow healing of the region’s metropolitan economies that has differed starkly from the region’s past boom-bust cycles.

Overview Of Economic Development, Don Macke, Nancy Arnold, University Of Montana Rural Institute

Independent Living and Community Participation

Economic development is a vast concept with an abundance of meanings depending upon the audience. A widely accepted view of economic development is as follows: In the United States with our market economy focus, economic development typically centers on increasing private business activity as a way to increase new investment, job creation and tax base expansion. Economies and economic development should serve the needs of residents and society through the creation of meaningful work. (RUPRI Center for Rural Entrepreneurship, 2005) Historically, rehabilitation worked to restore as much lost function as possible so that a person with a disability could engage …

Mountain Monitor-4th Quarter 2011, Mark Muro, Kenan Fikri

Mountain Monitor Quarterly

Recovery was firmly underway in the Intermountain West by the fourth quarter of 2011 but its pace varied considerably across the region’s 10 major metropolitan areas. Six of the 10 metros saw job growth in the fourth quarter but only four saw it accelerate over the previous one. Output grew everywhere but only in half of the region’s metros did the pace of growth quicken. The unemployment rate was down across the board from one year earlier. House prices in most markets stabilized. Yet signs of a robust, sustained, and self-fueling recovery remained elusive.

National economic indicators from early 2012 …

L’Essor Et Le Déclin De L’Occident: Une Perspective Géographique (The Rise And Fall Of The West: A Geographical Perspective), Nicole Andréa Mathys, Jean-Marie Grether, Claude Lutzelschwab

Nicole Andréa Mathys

This paper proposes a new representation of the worldwide distribution of human population and economic activity over two millennia. Combining the Maddison and the G-Econ databases, it tracks the evolution of the world’s demographic and economic centers of gravity during the 1-2010 period. The distributional and temporal patterns that emerge are clear and contrasted, with a stable East- Asian predominance during the first eighteen centuries, followed by a boomerang-like westward shift during the last two centuries. New turning points are identified, suggesting that the reversal of the Western shift occurred as early as the 1920s in demographic terms and in …

Attraction And Retention—Maine’S Challenge, Ed Cervone

Maine Policy Review

In the Margaret Chase Smith Essay Ed Cervone, Presdent/CEO of the Maine Development Foundation, discusses Maine’s demographic challenges in attracting and retaining population if the state is to grow its economy and sustain that growth. He makes recommendations for attracting a larger, younger, and more diverse population.