Rural America’ slow to recover
By Norma Cohen, Demography Correspondent
Employment growth in the US’s sparsely populated heartland has stagnated since the economy began to recover in 2010, according to official data that underscore the weakening economic power of rural America.
The data, from this year’s US Department of Agriculture’s Rural America at a Glance report, show that while employment in both urban and rural areas fell by 5 per cent during the 2007-09 recession and recovered by a similar level in 2010, their prospects have since diverged. Since the start of 2011, net job growth in non-metropolitan areas has been near zero, while it has averaged 1.4 per cent annually in metropolitan areas.
The report notes that rural job growth stagnation has coincided with the first-ever recorded net population decline in those regions, driven by a drop in the number of new migrants moving in. This means the unemployment rate in rural regions has not risen, since fewer people are seeking work.
Population loss has meant fewer jobs as demand for goods and services falls, which in turn encourages those with higher skills to move away. Lower population density also makes it more expensive to deliver vital services, the report adds, potentially exacerbating population loss.
“This apparent historic shift to non-metro population loss highlights a growing demographic challenge facing much of rural and small-town America,” the department said. “A population growth from natural change (births minus deaths) is no longer sufficient to counter net migration losses when they occur.”
The report notes that the flat jobs growth in the rural US is far from uniform. In the northern Great Plains, where new methods of energy extraction are creating a mini-boom, employment is growing much faster than the national average. But the number of jobs has fallen by 4.1 per cent in rural Arkansas and 1.8 per cent in Illinois and Arizona.
The data also show striking contrasts in poverty levels. In rural households the rate is 17.7 per cent, compared with a national rate of 15 per cent and an urban rate of 14.5 per cent. Poverty is defined as a pre-tax income of less than $23,492 for a family of four.
Nearly six in seven high-poverty counties in the US between 2007 and 2011 were in non-metropolitan areas. Many have been classified as having high poverty for decades and are in or near Native American reservations and have large non-white populations. However, a growing number of largely white rural counties in the West and Midwest are now classified as manifesting high poverty levels.