HOW ECONOMICALLY INTERDEPENDENT IS THE PORTLAND METRO CORE WITH ITS RURAL PERIPHERY? A COMPARISON ACROSS TWO DECADES. by David Holland, Paul Lewin, Bruce Sorte and Bruce Weber February 2009 Working Paper Number RSP 0901 Rural Studies Program Oregon State University 213 Ballard Extension Hall Corvallis, OR 97331 (541) 737-1442
[email protected] This paper is a revision of a paper prepared for the Toward One Oregon: Rural-Urban Interdependence Conference, November 14, 2008, Salem, Oregon David Holland is professor emeritus at the School of Economic Sciences at Washington State University, Pullman, Washington; Paul Lewin is a graduate student at the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics at Oregon State University, Corvallis, Oregon. Bruce Sorte is Community Economist in the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics at Oregon State University, Corvallis, Oregon. Bruce Weber is Professor in the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics at Oregon State University, Corvallis and Director of the Rural Studies Program 2 Introduction Rural areas in many parts of this country have lagged economically relative to urban centers for many decades. This has been true particularly in the Pacific Northwest. The relative vitality of urban centers has led some to suggest that rural areas and rural policy ought to pursue a strategy of strengthening rural-urban economic linkages (Porter, 2004, Dabson, 2007). Not very much is known, however, about the economic relationship between urban centers and their rural hinterlands. Better understanding of the linkages between rural and urban economies would aid policymakers in addressing interrelated problems such as declining economic opportunity in rural regions that is often combined with losses in quality of life in urban areas experiencing high rates of population growth (Harrison and Sieb, 1990).