EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Urban Systems, Industrial Restructuring, and the Spatial—Temporal Diffusion of Manufacturing Employment

B M Moriarty
Additional contact information
B M Moriarty: Department of Geography, The University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3220, USA

Environment and Planning A, 1991, vol. 23, issue 11, 1571-1588

Abstract: This macroanalysis of manufacturing employment density distribution patterns in the United States from 1947 to 1982 supports the hypothesis that the nation's hierarchical system of cities has served to sort geographically manufacturing operations on the basis of the marginal returns that could be derived from different size urban centers. As a consequence of this sorting process, nonproduction workers have become more concentrated in large urban centers whereas production workers have become more concentrated in smaller settlements. With the greater number of large urban centers in the Northeast and East North-Central regions, nonproduction workers have become more concentrated in the Manufacturing Belt and production workers more concentrated in other regions of the country. The process has helped foster the development of a mosaic of geographically bifurcated labor markets among the larger and smaller urban centers throughout the country. The research suggests that the role of the urban hierarchy in the redistribution of manufacturing employment was a historical stage in the geographic expansion of development and that its influence has begun to wane.

Date: 1991
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1068/a231571 (text/html)

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:sae:envira:v:23:y:1991:i:11:p:1571-1588

DOI: 10.1068/a231571

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Environment and Planning A
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-19
Handle: RePEc:sae:envira:v:23:y:1991:i:11:p:1571-1588