The interactions between the processes of urbanization and international migration in less developed and transition countries have important repercussions for socioeconomic development, but are not well understood. Based on the retrospective data from the Albanian Living Standards Measurement Survey 2008, we first assess the geography of migration in terms of the rural-urban continuum, the urba...

OBJECTIVES This report details the National Center for Health Statistics' (NCHS) development of the 2006 NCHS Urban-Rural Classification Scheme for Counties and provides some examples of how the scheme can be used to describe differences in health measures by urbanization level. METHODS The 2006 NCHS urban-rural classification scheme classifies all U.S. counties and county-equivalents into si...

OBJECTIVE This study's objective was to determine whether junior medical students' end-of-rotation shelf exam scores varied by the preceptorship county's rurality. METHODS Student learning during rural preceptorship experiences, 1999 to 2005, was assessed using the students' scores on the National Board of Medical Examiners family medicine subject examination. Rurality was measured using both...

BACKGROUND This study concerns depression among women living in developing and developed parts of the world. Using a continuum of environments conceptualized as ranging from traditional to modern, the goal is to explore the hypothesis that the prevalence of depression will be higher among those living in modern compared to traditional societies. This issue is examined among samples from West Af...

Poverty rates are highest in the most urban and most rural areas of the United States, and are higher in non-metropolitan (nonmetro) than metropolitan (metro) areas, yet rural poverty remains relatively obscured from mainstream political and popular attention. This fact has motivated considerable research by rural social scientists on the relationship between poverty and place generally, and ru...

In this analysis, Medical Expenditure Panel Survey data from 2000 were used to examine differences in reports of preventive health service utilization in 4 types of counties: large metropolitan counties, small metropolitan counties, counties adjacent to metropolitan places, and counties not adjacent to metropolitan areas or with fewer than 10,000 residents. Women from counties with 10,000 or fe...

We construct a general equilibrium model of urban unemployment with a continuum of heterogeneous urban firms producing differentiated products in a monopolistic competitive market. We show that an increase in urban institutionally fixed minimum wage reduces urban aggregate output and each urban firm will experience an output cut proportional to the change in aggregate output. However, such prop...

This paper examines the distribution of dentists among U.S. counties along the rural-urban continuum. Dentist workforce availability has implications for oral health care access and utilization, which in turn can affect the quality of life, health, and productivity of rural residents. In addition, dentists form part of the non-tradable services sector, and its erosion may affect the vitality of...