Why some US nonmetropolitan counties moved out of persistent high-poverty status in the 1990s

Abstract

Nearly one-third of US nonmetropolitan counties that began the 1990s with persistent high poverty were not high-poverty counties by the end of the decade. Aside from the poverty rate at the beginning of the decade, it is found that employment growth, along with indicators of the initial quality of the labour force and level of human-capital, increased the probability of counties moving out of persistent high-poverty status.

Acknowledgements

The authors appreciate financial support from the W. E. Upjohn Institute for this research and thank Tim Bartik and Jamie Partridge for their helpful comments. The paper was written while Dan Rickman was a Visiting Professor in the Department of Agricultural Economics at the University of Saskatchewan.

Notes

Economic Research Services of the US Department of Agriculture defines 20% as the threshold for high-poverty classification. (http://www.ers.usda.gov/Briefing/IncomePovertyWelfare/HighPoverty/)

Only 27 of the high-poverty counties in 2000 were not part of these clusters; fifteen were farming areas in the northern Great Plains. (http://www.ers.usda.gov/Briefing/IncomePovertyWelfare/HighPoverty/analysis.htm)

Data are from the Decennial Censuses, except the employment growth and the industry restructuring measures, which are derived from US Bureau of Economic Analysis data.