New Approaches to Rural Policy: Lessons from around the World-A Conference Summary

New approaches to rural policy are badly needed, as past reliance on subsidies and policies focused on a single sector are yielding diminishing results. Fortunately, a new frontier of policy experiments is emerging, and this frontier holds great promise in helping rural regions seize new economic potential. ; This was the consensus of more than 120 leading officials and rural policy experts from around the world who gathered near Washington, D.C., on March 25-26, 2004, to explore new approaches to rural policy. The conference was jointly sponsored by the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the Rural Policy Research Institute, and The Countryside Agency (UK). ; Amid a flurry of new initiatives, participants agreed that new rural policies generally have two distinguishing features. First, they focus on exploiting each region’s distinct economic assets instead of trying to develop a sector that will “lift all boats,” as in most developed nations historically, where the sector of choice for rural regions has been agriculture. Second, public funds are aimed at constructing the public goods that will spur private sector investments. Indeed, investment is a strong theme of many new initiatives, with a deliberate attempt to scale back subsidies.