Crossing the Geographic Divide

Tom Barkin

Speech from Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond

Abstract: Economic growth depends on how many people are working and how productive they are. Given slow population and productivity growth, future economic growth may depend on people currently on the sidelines of the labor market. Many people who have left the labor force have done so for demographic reasons and are unlikely to return. But there are large disparities among working-age people by education, race, gender and geography. For example, both the employment-population ratio and labor force participation rate are lower in rural than in urban areas. There are large divides within cities as well. Education and workforce development are the keys to improving employment outcomes. Better employment outcomes for many groups will help ensure our country's future growth, as well as help address poverty and its associated ills.

Keywords: employment and labor markets; urban economics; small town and rural communities (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018-10-02
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.richmondfed.org/press_room/speeches/th ... rkin_speech_20181002 Speech (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:fip:r00034:101361

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Speech from Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Matt Myers ().