Employment Change in Micropolitan America: 1980–2000

Micropolitan areas, or sub-metropolitan urban clusters, have become an important part of the U.S. settlement landscape. Within these micropolitan counties the transactions between industries are limited so issues of growth and change can be addressed by economic base analysis. Recent research by the author and others has largely focused on estimating “static” employment multipliers, where the level of local jobs depends on the level of export jobs. While these multipliers can be useful when assessing the impacts of new investments, they do not capture the remarkable shifts—in business expansion and population growth—that have recently occurred in so many micropolitan places. In response, this paper adapts the economic base perspective to highlight the changes in local employment that were experienced across the nation’s more than 550 micropolitan counties during the time period 1980–2000. So, alternatively, “dynamic” multipliers are estimated, where the change in local jobs depends in large part on the change in export jobs. Moreover, allowances are made for the effects of non-earnings income, initial specialization, and an array of contextual (county-level) conditions, including natural amenities and relative location. Those changes found in the nation’s micropolitan counties are then compared to those found in the Southeast’s micropolitan counties. The results indicate that shifts in export jobs were less important and shifts in non-earnings income were more important in creating local jobs throughout the Southeast than elsewhere in the nation.