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AbstractThe recent literature is replete with studies of cities and city‐regions, citing their various advantages in innovation, production, and consumption. So what sort of future can a non‐metropolitan place expect? This paper argues that these places are surprisingly heterogeneous and, as such, their futures will be highly mixed. Those small communities and rural areas blessed with ample land‐based or energy resources, or easy access to bountiful natural amenities, should continue to enjoy bright prospects. Most micropolitan centres, especially those having substantial urban cores and enjoying nearness to larger cities, should continue to prosper. Some smaller centres might even benefit from innovation that happens to thrive on local knowledge or social proximity. But those small places and rural areas lacking in resources, amenities, and metropolitan proximity will likely continue to decline.

AbstractLocal and regional development practitioners continue to widely use economic (export) base analysis to assess the strengths and weaknesses of sub‐national economies. This paper proposes an alternative means for allocating the total employment of small regions into their basic (export‐oriented) and nonbasic (locally‐oriented) components, thereby allowing a shortcut calculation of the economic base multiplier. The new regression‐based method, which makes use of the Arizona Community Data Set, is designed to supplement, and possibly replace, the well‐known assignment, location quotient, and minimum requirements methods. Multipliers based on the four shortcut method are then compared over the time period 1980–2000. All estimates are based on a different data set comprised of nearly 200 communities located in the U.S. Southwest.

ABSTRACT The Arizona Community Data Set (ACDS) now contains the results of 40 separate establishment‐level, community‐wide surveys. These communities can be classified into different functional types, and OLS regression models can be used to explore the relationships among community functions, levels of public transfer payments, and magnitudes of economic base multipliers. The statistical analysis suggests that employment‐derived estimates of the base multiplier tend to be biased upward unless transfer payments are specified in the model.