Natural resources play a role in economic development, but the exact nature and importance of that role is a matter of dispute. The spectacular development of natural resource poor Japan compared with a, say, relatively well endowed Argentina certainly indicates that the lack of resources need not undully hinder development while their abundance does not insure rapid growth. Much of the difference lies, undoubtedly, with the human and institutional factors.

While many people would argue that absolute deprivation has been eliminated from this country, poverty, or relative deprivation, still exists. Recognition of this problem is not new Despite public policies to redistribute income, the public's demand for lessened personal income inequality has never been completely satisfied.

Many persons in rural areas in the U.S. are dependent largely on labor earnings for their economic well-being. Seventy-five percent of the 14.8 million rural nonfarm persons and fifty-two percent of the rural farm persons 16 years old and over who were employed in 1969 were employed as wage and salary workers. Of the 1.6 million rural nonfarm families with incomes less than the poverty level in 1969, 51 percent had male heads less than 65 years of age, and 71 percent of these male heads were in the labor force in 1969. Sixty-seven percent of the 442,000 rural farm families with incomes less than the poverty level had a male head less than 65 years old and 81 percent of these male heads were in the labor force in 1969.

The objective of this paper is to compare alternative ways of reducing the input of biologically available phosphorus to Cayuga Lake from the Fall Creek watershed. This watershed covers 125 square miles, contains 130 dairy farms, has a population of 12,000, and is one of the major tributaries of the lake. Comparisons are made on the basis of the cost per pound of biologically available phosphorus prevented from entering the lake. Four sources of phosphorus, three of them farm-related, are considered: (1) land runoff as related to soil erosion; (2) land runoff as related to manure applications; (3) barnyard runoff; and (4) municipal sewage.

Interest in land-use planning and control in the United States has recently shifted to a variety of non-conventional tools in an attempt to attain results that have eluded older techniques such as traditional zoning. A major land-use objective has been to continue certain existing land uses in the face of market pressures to convert to more intensive uses. This has been the case, for example, with ecologically fragile areas such as wetlands, or environmentally valuable areas such as scenic land, which are also economically attractive for development into housing or industrial property. In recent years interest has also turned to preservation of agricultural land, particularly in areas near urban concentrations that are feeling the effects of urban sprawl.

The inshore lobster fishery is one of the more important ones in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, accounting for approximately 14 percent of the total landed value of all species in Massachusetts in 1971. Until recent years this fishery accounted for virtually all the pot landings in the state. Despite numerous attempts at conservation such as gear regulation, size restrictions, and prohibitions on harvesting egg-bearing females, the fishery has been subject to rapidly increasing effort and virtually constant landings. In the past decade it has become obvious to many fishery biologists and economists that conservation of fish stocks is a necessary but not sufficient criterion for fisheries management. Resource managers have become increasingly aware of the interdependence between economic factors and the intensity, location and composition of fishing effort.

Present Federal legislation imposes stringent water quality standards on point source emissions from agricultural operations. In the future, individual states may propose policies which are even more restrictive. A number of studies have examined the normative responses to antipollution regulations at the individual farm level (e.g. Ashraf and Christensen for the Massachusetts dairy industry; Gaede for the Massachusetts egg industry). These studies assumed that individual benchmark farms would achieve compliance with pollution standards by adopting the least cost alternative disposal method. They permitted as activities in a linear programming framework only those waste disposal practices considered capable of meeting regulations.

Farm employment fell from 12.8 million workers in 1929 to 4.4 million in 1974. One frequent explanation for this drastic drop in employment is the replacement of labor inputs in this sector by cheaper and more productive capital inputs. Assuming the farm labor market was in equilibrium at the start of this substitution process (admittedly a weak assumption but not crucial to this paper) the farm workers forced out of their chosen occupations were the most apparent losers in the process. If labor's share of the farm income dollar did not decrease as rapidly as the number of workers, then the remaining farm workers would be one group of beneficiaries of the process. Another would be society in general if total productivity increased. This paper will examine another potential group of beneficiaries, the shareholders and workers in the rest of the economy whose business and employment are tied to the provision of fixed capital inputs for the farming sector. Data availability, unfortunately, only allows us to identify economic implications for these groups at one point, 1971, in this ongoing process of transition. Nevertheless, these results are of interest since the groups who have benefited have not likely changed and our understanding of the rural adjustment process as well as the impact of technological innovations may be enhanced.

In the past, open dump burning has been the solid waste disposal method used by many small rural towns because from a strict monetary perspective, it was the least cost alternative available to them. Now, due to environmental legislation prohibiting open dumps, they must ex-tablish new disposal facilities. The traditional environmentally acceptable alternatives of incineration and/or sanitary landfill necessarily involve increased disposal costs for these towns, with the increases being especially pronounced for towns in areas like New Hampshire where fuel oil prices are high and suitable sites for sanitary landfill are scarce.

Communities across the country are faced with the legal requirements to reduce water pollution from domestic and industrial wastes discharged into streams and rivers. Approximately 7½ billion gallons of wastewater were produced daily in the United States in 1972. This volume is estimated to quadruple over the next 50 years.