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

[309538 .贝特曼]本合作项目的目的是收集美国北半部140个乡镇的联邦农业和人口普查中剩余的农场和家庭数据，并在关键时刻从这些数据中收集一个涵盖美国经济重要部门的面板数据库。这些数据将在20多年前从这些相同社区抽取的横截面样本与现在正在完成的类似横截面样本之间形成关键联系。这些横截面涵盖了三十年期间成千上万的农场和成千上万的个人。他们对美国农村的经济和社会互动以及个体农民所做决定的结果提供了最详细和全面的观点之一。将利用这些面板数据解决的问题包括农业对竞争变化的适应，运输成本降低导致的市场规模和范围，以及国际贸易政策的变化；农场结构和农场所有制的变化；以及农村人口向城市迁移对农村地区的影响。这项研究很重要，因为它将为美国经济在其历史的关键时期的发展提供新的见解，它将为经济学家、人口学家、农村社会学家和其他对经济增长和发展以及农村向城市迁移感兴趣的学者提供一个有价值的数据库。＊＊＊

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. ***