Economic development practitioners and theorists recognize that community-based strategies offer the best opportunity for rural economic development. But, rural communities also need assistance in identifying and implementing their strategies. Two key needs are financial support and technical...

This article reviews the literature that evaluates WalMart’s impacts on local economies. The authors first describe the methods used to account for potential reverse causality of WalMart’s store location decisions, and then they discuss the literature assessing the company’s...

In this paper, we define social capital from different perspectives and show how it is linked to the concept of a community. Based on these definitions, a conceptual framework for analyzing and measuring social capital and its indicators is developed. A typology for analyzing social capital is...

This is a new version of a series of color slides on social capital as presented at a conference on rural development presented in Tampa, Florida in 2004, and sponsored by the Southern Rural Development Center.