Nonmetro Manufacturing Counties Regaining Employment
Robert
Gibbs
Employment levels in nonmetro America have
recovered from declines experienced in the 2001
recession and were just over 1 percent higher in
2005 than they were 5 years earlier. Yet nonmetro
counties differed widely in their patterns of employment
loss and recovery over this period. In 2005, 46
percent of all nonmetro counties had fewer working
residents than in 2000. These employment-loss counties
had about 5 percent fewer working residents in 2005
than in 2000 on average, with most of the losses
occurring during the first 2 years of the decade.
The extent of employment loss
among these counties depended in part on the types
of economic activity driving the local economy.
Counties dependent on manufacturing—about
a third of all employment-loss counties from 2000
to 2005—saw particularly steep employment
declines at the beginning of the decade as imported
manufactured goods captured an increasing share
of the U.S. market. Despite the rapidity of the
decline, manufacturing nonmetro counties have since
recovered jobs more quickly than other employment-loss
nonmetro counties. In 2005, the typical employment-loss
county dependent on manufacturing added working
residents, and trends suggest that these counties
will continue to outperform other employment-loss
counties in the near term.
Many employment-loss counties
dependent on farming have experienced stagnant or
declining employment for several decades. Nearly
two out of every five farming-dependent counties
(171 out of 440) have lost employment since 1970.
Furthermore, employment change in these counties
had a weaker relationship to the economic downturn
at the start of the decade than in other nonmetro
counties. With the exception of a brief uptick during
2002-03, employment in farming-dependent counties
dropped 1.5-2.5 percent per year from 2000 to 2005.
Uneven rates of job growth are
typical during economic recessions and recoveries.
Even so, the national economic slowdown was not
the only factor determining employment change in
nonmetro counties that lost jobs. Long-term local
economic and demographic characteristics also may
have affected employment levels in certain counties.
For example, about 40 percent of nonmetro counties
losing employment from 2000 to 2005 also lost employment
from 1995 to 2000, a time of generally robust growth
in the U.S. economy. Declines in employment and
population often reinforce each other in places
where economic and technological change have reduced
the long-run demand for labor.
This
finding is drawn from . . . |
| Rural
America at a Glance, 2006 Edition,
edited by Lorin Kusmin, EIB-18, USDA, Economic
Research Service, August 2006. |
|
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