New Approaches to Rural Policy: Lessons from around the World-A Conference Summary
总结了2004年一场国际会议关于农村政策新路径的共识，指出新政策应聚焦区域经济资产、减少补贴、促进私人投资，对政策制定者和农村发展研究者有参考价值。
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.