Earlham College | News from Public Affairs

Mark Drabenstott ’77 is the director of the Rural Policy Research Institute's National Center for Regional Competitiveness at the University of Missouri, where he is also a research professor.

RICHMOND, Ind. — Mark Drabenstott '77 came to Earlham College as a basketball- playing farm boy from Fort Wayne.

He returns to Earlham and the Richmond area as one of the world's leading experts in regional economic development and presents "Winning in the Global Economic Olympics: Finding Richmond's Shot at the Gold" at 4 p.m. on Monday, Feb. 25, in the Landrum Bolling Center's Loose Lecture Hall. Admission is free, and the public is invited.

Drabenstott grew up on his family's Indiana farm and learned agriculture and basketball firsthand. He came to Earlham as a basketball recruit and went on to earn his master's and doctorate degrees in economics from Iowa State University. Drabenstott's career in rural economics includes a 25-year stint at the Federal Reserve Bank in Kansas City. He has testified in more than 15 congressional hearings on rural economics and has served as an international adviser and researcher in more than seven countries.

In September 2006, he was named founding director of the Rural Policy Research Institute's National Center for Regional Competitiveness, which is the nation's leading source of information and analytics on regional development in the 21st century. The Center helps public and private leaders in regions craft winning strategies in the global economy.

"It may have worked in the past to suggest that Richmond had cheaper land, labor and taxes than larger cities like New York, Chicago and Indianapolis, but now towns must compete with the land, labor and taxes in China and South Asia," he says. "Now, do you really want to win that argument? Do you really want to have the cheapest labor in the world?"

Globalization has forced regions to become athletes competing for the gold medal in the global marketplace.

"My center works to help regions develop the tools they need to compete," Drabenstott says. "We find out what they are best at and then point out strategies to help them use that strength to their advantage."

Innovation is more important now than simply being a low-cost site, and entrepreneurship is one of the keys, he says.

"Instead of being buffalo hunters and placing factories on farmland at the edge of town, now it's more like economic gardeners growing more of the businesses in their own backyards," he says.

"I grew up on a farm in Indiana just south of Fort Wayne," he says. "I got my Ph.D. in agricultural economics at Iowa State and have been a recovering agricultural economist ever since."

Del Harris recruited Drabenstott to play basketball at Earlham. When the eventual NBA coach left the College before his sophomore year, Drabenstott devoted more and more attention to studying economics.

"One of the things in my years as an economist is that I have spent a great deal of my life explaining complicated economic issues to a variety of people, and I see where all of those term papers at Earlham have paid off," he says. "My economist colleagues had technical backgrounds like math or they were economics majors at bigger universities, but I found that my ability to synthesize large amounts of information into the core issues gave me a competitive advantage.

"In one respect my career is a good reminder to people that the liberal arts background serves people well who go on to specialized careers."

"When I left Earlham, although I may not have known it at the time, I had the framework to begin to understand the rest of the world," he says. "And that framework has been the steady rudder guiding my decisions on issues throughout my life."

Contact:
Mark Blackmon, director of media relations
765/983-1256 — E-Mail Mark