News Release Distributed 03/16/15

BATON ROUGE, La. – The U.S. Department of Agriculture recently awarded $14 million in grants through its Agriculture Food and Research Initiative to support programs aimed at increasing prosperity in rural America. Matt Fannin, LSU AgCenter economist and associate professor in the LSU College of Agriculture, is part of a group that received $500,000 to study rural communities and regional development.

Fannin said he will focus on measuring and modeling rural wealth for sustainable and broad-based rural prosperity.

“In our society, we measure what we value – the number of jobs created, unemployment rate. We want to find more effective ways of measuring wealth, particularly some of these wealth measures that are not traded in the marketplace,” Fannin said.

Fannin leads a team that includes Tom Johnson, of the Rural Policy Research Institute at the University of Missouri, and John Pender, of the USDA Economic Research Service.

Through the grant, the team will look for methods to price different types of wealth assets in rural communities. Fannin said measuring the value that natural wealth such as lakes and rivers as well as social and cultural capital of rural places adds to the value of marketable assets such as residential homes.

“If we can measure their value, then we have a way to understand how to more effectively invest in those assets and look at how they generate returns,” he said.

Results from research can influence policy makers to look at long-term returns when investing in rural communities and rural economic development, Fannin said.

Another component of the grant is education. Fannin said the grant will help redevelop curricula around this wealth-creation framework. He and his colleagues are planning to create a graduate-level or upper undergraduate-level course designed from the research as well as develop independent rural policy modules that can be posted online and used in other courses to add a rural policy element.

Fannin’s work stems from a book he helped write and co-edit, “Rural Wealth Creation,” which investigates the role of wealth in achieving sustainable economic development.

Fannin said after attending a wealth creation strategies conference funded by the USDA and the Ford Foundation in 2011, economic researchers and practitioners sought to develop wealth creation best practices. Fannin said the book came out of that and is relevant to students, researchers and policy makers looking at rural community development.

“Many rural communities are seeing stagnant or declining populations, and in Louisiana, they often have high poverty, so we need to look at alternative ways to create and sustain wealth,” Fannin said.