West Virginia University will play a key role in a new U.S. Department of Agriculture policy center that will offer rural development advice to decision makers on a national level.
Gianfranco Piras, a research assistant professor with the WVU Regional Research Institute, is part of a team of researchers from Pennsylvania State University and Michigan State University that will participate in the center funded by a grant from the USDA.
Director of WVU RRI Randall Jackson said the policy research center will examine and report on the effects of public policies and trade agreements on farm and agricultural sectors; the environment; rural families, households, and economies; and consumers, food, and nutrition.
Piras said his role is to do county-level econometric analyses and provide timely and policy-relevant information that will be used by the center to advise Congress and other decision makers. Econometrics is a statistical method used by economists to test hypotheses using real world information.
Piras’ contributions to the work are unique because use of spatial analysis in policy making is only just beginning to be used. Spatial analysis is a technique that accounts for the spatial or geographical dimension of research information.
Spatial statistical techniques are shedding new light on critical research affecting effective public and private sector policy-making.
He said that standard techniques that have been used in analysis makes the assumption that the data related to specific issues are independent and not geographically related. The techniques involved with spatial analysis takes into account geographically correlated data and can provide more accurate answers about policy impacts than standard techniques.
“The geographic nature of the data the center will handle requires the use of innovative spatial econometric methods that have to date not been frequently used in this area of research,” Piras said. “Ignoring potential spatial effects in the data corresponds to omitting key factors that could jeopardize the accuracy of the results.”
Piras will provide guidance on the specification, estimation and interpretation of spatial models that will lead to more appropriate and informative conclusions, provide advice to graduate students in terms of spatial modeling strategies, and provide guidance in the identification and use of appropriate software required for the estimation of such models.
Jackson said that the presence of Piras and Donald J. Lacombe, both acknowledged leaders in spatial econometrics, places WVU at the forefront of the field.
The mission of the WVU Regional Research Institute is to conduct and promote scholarly research focusing on theories and history of regional development, methods for studying regions, and policies for stimulating their development. The RRI seeks to advance understanding of socioeconomic processes and our ability to explain regional differences in rates of growth and levels of development. RRI activities are both national and international in scope, with a special focus on our own Appalachian region.
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CONTACT: Gerrill Griffith, WVU Research Corp.
304.293.3743, Gerrill.Griffith@mail.wvu.edu
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