There is limited recent research on the strategies that rural local governments are employing in the face of changing intergovernmental relationships, especially in relation to local economic development. This paper draws on data from a survey of local governments in the Ohio River Valley Region that includes a mix of localities on the urban‐rural continuum, to empirically address three issues. First, we examined the extent to which county governments have undertaken local economic development initiatives as well as other, extra‐economic activities designed to improve community well‐being. Second, we assessed the extent to which rural county governments vary from urban counties in their activities and available resources. Finally, we employed logistic regression models of factors associated with use of development strategies to determine the relationship between rurality and local development policy activities. The results show that rural counties are less likely than urban counties to undertake various economic development activities, with observed urban‐rural differences largely attributable to county socioeconomic disadvantages, such as poverty and education.

The purpose of this article is to assess the data resources currently available to measure the scope and structure of the nonprofit sector and to describe an effort underway to fill some of the existing knowledge gaps. This article discusses a rich but so far underutilized source of data on nonprofit employment: the ES-202 data program managed by State Employment Security Agencies under the supervision of the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. This article first identifies a set of criteria for evaluating existing data on nonprofit institutions, then applies these criteria to the existing sources of empirical data on these institutions, and finally describes the effort now underway through the Johns Hopkins Nonprofit Employment Data Project to produce employment data from the ES-202 system to close some of the gaps that currently exist in our ability to measure the scope and structure of the nonprofit sector.

The commercialization of nonprofit organizations has recently taken center stage as one of the pivotal policy issues facing this sector in the United States and elsewhere. In many ways, American museums have long been at the forefront of the trend with the operation of retail activities in the form of museum stores, mail-order catalogues and, most recently, web-based virtual shops. While museums in other parts of the world have begun to follow the American example, there has been relatively little scrutiny of the viability of this commercialization strategy. This article examines US tax and census data to chart the development of museum merchandising revenues from the 1980s to the 1990s.

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