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ANCHORAGE - At the general store in Noorvik, an Inupiaq village on the banks of the Kobuk River, Pauline Morris and her customers are on a constant quest for dollars and coins.

It's not unusual for a local customer to walk into the Morris Trading Post with a $500 or $1,000 paycheck and use it to buy $20 in groceries, she says.

Typically, Morris hands them whatever cash she can spare and writes them a check for the balance. A stamp on the check identifies it as change _ it becomes a sort of "faux currency" that some will use as cash elsewhere in town.

Like most remote villages, Noorvik has no bank and no ATM. And when the trading post runs out of dollars and coins, "I have to go out and get them," Morris says.

That means a bank run to Kotzebue - 37 miles away by plane at a cost of $170 or more round trip - to get stacks of bills and hundreds of dollars' worth of pennies and quarters.

"I get the cash wherever I travel," Morris says.

This Bush banking method has kept small village stores running for decades. Despite communication advances like high-speed Internet that have begun to penetrate remote villages, plenty of people still lack bank accounts, Morris said.

While the cash economy has crept into most of Alaska's most remote places, its foundation -cash, itself - is often missing.

"In communities so small that there aren't ways to send funds electronically, the merchants and the post offices are the ones making the economy go," said Jennifer Imus, a senior manager for Wells Fargo Bank in Fairbanks.

That's in stark contrast to the enormous amount of wealth produced in some of these regions. The North Slope produces the state's most lucrative commodity: oil. The waters off the Bering Sea produce millions of dollars' worth of groundfish. The Red Dog Mine in the northwest Arctic produces billions of dollars' worth of metals. The communities do get some jobs and royalties from these globally owned industries, but relatively speaking, only a fraction of the wealth enters the villages.

"There's always economic activities that bypass these rural communities," said Scott Goldsmith, a researcher for the University of Alaska's Institute for Social and Economic Research.

His institute led a $210,000 study last year to find out how remote, locally owned small businesses in Alaska succeed in spite of the obstacles and inconveniences that result from tiny markets, remote geography, harsh weather and massive fuel and transportation costs.

The study, "Viable Business Enterprises for Rural Alaska," probed nearly 2,800 rural business licenses and queried U.S. Census data to ferret out the shared characteristics of communities where businesses have multiplied.

ISER has seen the need for this kind of data for decades, said the study's lead author, Sharman Haley, an economist at the institute.

The study found, for example, that villages close to national parks, with strong local commercial fisheries or with comparatively lower travel costs from Anchorage are likely to have a larger, more diverse set of businesses. And it found that location is more critical than population size in determining the number of businesses in a community.

It also found that the communities grow a more diverse crop of businesses by trapping "non-local dollars" - exporting Native arts and crafts, snagging military cleanup contracts or wooing tourists, for example.

The researchers surveyed 196 business owners in 19 remote villages to find out their amounts and sources of revenue, their biggest startup and operating challenges and their biggest remaining needs, among other things.

A practical goal for the study: to help future rural business owners understand the problems they will face and to help agencies and foundations offer the right kind of assistance that will allow more remote rural businesses to prosper, the researchers said.

The majority of business owners surveyed said business training and better infrastructure and communication systems were the best things that outside organizations could offer them, according to the study.

The researchers also published in-depth case studies of more than 20 businesses in remote villages, which offer some poignant stories from rural entrepreneurs about how they succeeded or why they failed. For example:

• A tribe-owned company in Galena in the Interior prospered by contracting with the military to clean up industrial contamination that polluted land near its village.

• A family-owned logging company on Prince of Wales Island in Southeast failed after its owners took on a large contract requiring many new employees. The owners ran into financial trouble because they didn't understand cash flow, bookkeeping and the costs of maintaining employees.

• The village Native corporation for Point Lay, a small community on the Chukchi Sea coast, is introducing high-speed Internet services in their community and other villages across the state.

"It was wonderful to hear people tell their stories," said Jane Angvik, a private researcher in Anchorage who oversaw the case studies.

"It restored my hope in the tenacity of rural communities to survive," she said.