Collaborative Research on American Agriculture in an Industrializing World: Completing a Panel Database

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9309538 Bateman The purpose of this collaborative project is to collect the remaining farm and household data from the federal censuses of agriculture and population for a sample of 140 rural townships across the northern half of the United States, and to assemble from them a panel database covering a vital sector of the American economy at a crucial juncture in time. The data will form a critical link between a cross-sectional sample from these same communities that was drawn over twenty years ago and a similar cross-sectional sample that is now being completed. These cross-sections cover a thirty-year period for tens of thousands of farms and hundreds of thousands of individuals. They provide one of the most detailed and comprehensive views of economic and social interactions in rural America and the outcomes of the decisions made by individual farmers. Among the questions that will be addressed using these panel data are agricultural's adaptation to change in competition, the scale and scope of markets resulting from reductions in transportation costs, and changes in international trade policies; the changing structure of farms and farm ownership; and the consequences of rural to urban migration upon rural areas. This research is important because it will offer new insights into the development of the American economy at a critical period of its history, and it will produce a valuable database for economists, demographers, rural sociologist, and other scholars interested in economic growth and development and rural to urban migration. ***