with other projects and institutional research.

Priority Questions for Research

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Any list of needed research, including this one, is incomplete and slanted. It will reflect the concerns and conceptual framework of its proponent, and even where it proposes an area of activity it may not pose the question in the most fruitful form. In the choice of areas and questions from the infinite number of those possible, some loose criteria and pointers are used. In this case these are that the answers would be worth knowing for the diagnosis of problems or the formulation and evaluation of solutions; and that the research can be done within the state of the art and within some reasonable time. At the same time, some account is taken of areas of research that seem to be ongoing without benefit of H.U.D. support.

Research questions and areas have been put into two groups, labelled A and B. Those in the first group are to my mind the more feasible and immediately useful, although many of the questions in the second group are intrinsically more important. Many of the questions in the second group should be given priority if a qualified researcher were able to come up with a good research strategy or technique.

The First Group of Research Areas

A.1.

National Overview and Related Research

It is

This includes a broad range of possible activities. recommended because it is intrinsically national in scale, immediately doable, likely to call attention to this policy area and useful for policy formulation. Its main drawback is that data generation and processing may in some cases be quite expensive.

A necessary condition for activities in this area of research is the development of one or more lively repositories of territorially disaggregated data, including inter-local interactions, such as that being developed at Oak Ridge National Laboratories. In-house analysis by those familiar with the data range and limitations will undoubtedly be useful, and particular stress should be laid to development of ways by which these centers can interact with other scholars, whether

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supported by H.U.D. or not. The development of an effective service facility is the major challenge to this activity, for it would both reduce the cost of all research in this area and make practical many studies which would be otherwise unfeasible.

Beyond this first step, every effort should be made to develop and use national interregional accounting systems. The Department of Commerce has just had developed a set of interregional input-output tables. These should be kept current, and they should be used to keep them limber. Sectoral projections should be plugged into this system to obtain regional effect projections on a regular basis, and other uses should be found such as analysis of the consequences of growth in one region upon the growth of other regions. This expensively developed data base has the potential, if it is used, to draw national attention to regional development issues, and to the relation of local growth or no-growth in one region to those of other regions.

Another set of national accounts is now possible. A prototype has recently been developed of national interregional demographic

accounts

*

which would be useful for nationally consistent local population projections under various assumptions, for policy testing, and for the evaluation of the feasibility of configurations in terms of their implicit population movements. This too would serve to draw national attention to regional development issues and to the relation of local growth to those of other regions.

A word is needed as to the relation of these two types of accounts. Interregional input-output assumes that population will distribute itself in accordance to the distribution of economic activity; interregional demographic accounts assumes that economic activity will distribute itself to suit the dynamics of population distribution. The reality lies somewhere in between, for people chase jobs and jobs chase people. But in realistic terms, the integration of these two models is a distant hope, so that they should be used in tandem to test the limits of projections under one or the other set of assumptions.

William Alonso, National Interregional Demographic Accounts: A Prototype, Monograph No. 17, Institute of Urban and Regional Development, University of California, Berkeley, 1973.

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A third set of national accounts would be extremely valuable. This is a national set of interregional money transfer accounts, which would reveal not only the transfer among regions of payments for goods and services (as the input-output accounts do), but also the money transfers involved in government taxes and subsidies, pensions, private transfers, and others. This would clearly be most useful. There is fairly well developed theory and some small studies in this area, notably by Leven and Tiebout, but it is my impression that the data are not available to do it.

Other national overview research, however, seems quite doable. This includes estimates of the extent of the interregional gap in jobs (labor force participation) and income, particularly in relation to the equity goal. How many jobs and how much money would be needed to wipe out interregional differences nationally? Clearly the answer would depend on the level of territorial disaggregation, but answers should be rather easily available under a variety of regional definitions, and should help to define the magnitude of the problems. Conversely, under the efficiency criterion, it should be relatively easy to arrive at estimates of the foregone national product resulting from territorial structural unemployment and underemployment.

Another type of national overview that should be doable and revealing is shift-share analysis of the industrial sources of regional growth and decline. These would assist in the diagnosis of the nature of the problem of declining areas, among other things. In a similar technical vein, and quite easy to do, would be an analysis of the sources of interregional income differentials, as they depend on industrial and occupational composition, on labor force participation overall and by sex, and by dependency ratios. A number of existing studies, ranging from the classical one by Perloff and associates to lesser known ones by Lowry and Eisenmenger, testify to the importance of this type of information.

In general, such national overview studies should be quite revealing and their information should be both useful and capable of drawing attention. The techniques are almost fully developed and the information is at hand, so that the remaining difficulties may be termed engineering rather than scientific. Perhaps the reason why they

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have not been done more consistently in the past is that the cost is large from the point of view of individual research projects, although it is not particularly so from the point of view of a nationally useful activity. In other words, these are not risky scientific experiments, but rather middling expensive practical applications.

A final component of a national overview component seems quite easy but is most difficult. The previous components were based on analyses of census data. But the federal government has access to a great deal of internally generated data, and potentially to a great deal more. Local applications for categorical grants, and in the near future for special and possibly general revenue sharing, hold an extraordinary potential for national overview. Do local population, industrial, and investment projections add up? What local consequences are anticipated in terms of various national goal criteria? It seems clear that the documentation of local proposals could be structured in such a way that regional and national totals could be derived and examined for consistency. Yet, anyone familiar with governmental operations will recognize the difficulties involved. In the first place, many federal departments set the procedures: H.U.D. in housing and facilities, H.E.W. in a variety of services, Justice in civil order, Interior in the proposed land use controls, Agriculture in rural development, and so forth. To gather and make consistent these internal sources of reportage is a very difficult matter, although it may be aided by the proposed reorganization of federal government departments. The categories of information and the various perspective dates must be standardized for national aggregation. For all of the difficulty, the value of a nationally consistent set of local plans and projections is so obvious that priority should be given to the determination of standards of local reportage in collaboration with other federal agencies involved. Internally generated data arising out of government operations are presently not used up to their potential; and it is an in-house activity that no outside researcher or consultant can duplicate.

A.2.

Studies of Aspects of Population Decline

Population loss and heavy outmigration have been a major stimulus to national regional policies. It is too often assumed that such

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decline coincides with a decline in welfare.

While this may often be

the case, very often numerical decline may be associated with increased well-being for those who left and those who stayed, as discussed in the text. Although the majority of U.S. counties are in this category, there has been very little study of the process of depopulation in relation to occupational mobility, investment and disinvestment of capital, the fate of local businesses, the demographic patterns resulting from sex-age composition, and so forth. Most studies and proposals are of the process of growth, yet it would be very surprising if decline were simply symmetric to growth in these various matters. Since it will be the fate of many areas to decline in population, we need to know more about the varieties of decline, the varieties of problems and non-problems which arise under various circumstances, and the types of actions that may be taken to remedy them.

Decline is most widespread in small towns and rural areas, where over most of the nation population is thinning out. A particular area of research is the provision of services in these areas, particularly because centers are thinning out more than proportionately to population. In relation to what was called in earlier sections a policy of equity of access to services, it should be possible to make use of the extensive information and research experience of central place theory to investigate quite concretely these situations.

Population decline is not limited to small towns and rural areas. Several metropolitan areas, particularly small ones, have actually declined in population. The number of metropolitan areas with declining or virtually stable populations is certain to increase sharply in coming years as a result of the decline in the birth rate and the drying up of the sources of migration from non-metropolitan areas. Yet we have almost no idea as to what this will mean in terms of the operation of the housing market, fiscal balances, occupational mobility, education, values of land and other fixed capital, and so forth. It is likely that the problems will not be tragic ones for the most part, but it seems clear that it would be wise to begin now a serious exploration of a new and predictable national phenomenon.

Other instances of decline merit attention. Of course, the central cities of metropolitan areas have been in many cases declining,