 Long-Term Trends in Rural and Urban Poverty: New Insights Using a Historical Supplemental Poverty MeasureLaura B. Nolan, Jane Waldfogel and Christopher Wimer The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 2017, vol. 672, issue 1, 123-142 Abstract: Poverty has a strong relationship to geography in the United States. Previous research has found that rural areas have higher average poverty rates than urban areas, but the new supplemental poverty measure (SPM) has shown in recent years that urban areas have higher average poverty. In this article, we analyze poverty trends from 1967 to 2014 in rural and urban America, using the improved SPM metrics. We find a dramatic decline in poverty in rural areas, and also show that the geographic adjustment of the poverty threshold in the SPM (which lowers poverty thresholds in less expensive areas and raises them in more expensive areas) is an important explanatory factor. We also find that changes in the demographic and economic characteristics of rural and urban residents help to explain the decline. Last, we investigate whether migration of the poor between rural and urban areas helps to account for differential poverty trends, but we find little evidence in support of that hypothesis. Keywords: rural-urban poverty; inequality; demographic change; economic well-being (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:anname:v:672:y:2017:i:1:p:123-142 Access Statistics for this article More articles in The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science |
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