Rural Population Decline in the 1980s: Impacts of Farm Structure and Federal Farm Programs

Stephan Goetz and David Debertin ()

American Journal of Agricultural Economics, 1996, vol. 78, issue 3, 517-529

Abstract: Federal farm program benefits accrue disproportionately to large-scale farm operators, and continue largely because of the political influence of their beneficiaries. Some writers argue that these payments stem the movement of labor out of agriculture, ultimately reducing the pace of rural depopulation. Here, a theoretical model linking farm program payments to population loss is presented and empirically estimated for the years 1980–90. Larger farm program payments as a share of total cash marketing receipts were associated with greater population losses from rural counties. This result holds after controlling for other economic variables affecting population migration from rural areas. Copyright 1996, Oxford University Press.

Date: 1996
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (32)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.2307/1243270 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:oup:ajagec:v:78:y:1996:i:3:p:517-529

Access Statistics for this article

American Journal of Agricultural Economics is currently edited by Madhu Khanna, Brian E. Roe, James Vercammen and JunJie Wu

More articles in American Journal of Agricultural Economics from Agricultural and Applied Economics Association Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().