Rural Regional Innovation: A Response to Metropolitan-Framed Place-Based Thinking in the United States‪.‬

1. INTRODUCTION In the United States, there are many forces at work that make forging a coherent policy view of rural America extremely challenging. Apart from the more obvious forces such as the dramatic changes in economic structure and population distribution, there are questions about the nature of rurality and how it is measured, the perceived and potential contribution that rural people and places make to national well-being, and the appropriateness and effectiveness of public investments in rural America. These have been sharpened by the impact of the economic recession and the draconian measures that may be taken to shrink the federal deficit, and ironically by a new policy initiative introduced by the Obama Administration that embraces principles in support of "place-based investments."