Changing Livelihoods in Rural America

Abstract

Globalization and economic restructuring have profoundly affected the rural economy over the past 30 years (Glasmeier & Conroy, 1994). As noted in the introductory chapter, the notion of a rural economy reliant on a stable farming sector has been outmoded for decades. Today, fewer than one in 10 people living in rural America has a job directly related to farming. New competitive pressures will continue to change the rural economy and have significant impacts on the livelihoods of rural Americans, as workers in virtually all industries scramble to maintain a reasonable and sustainable standard of living in an increasingly volatile global market. At the same time, the ways in which globalization and economic restructuring play out both across geographic regions and within economic sectors is far from uniform. Impacts of these macro-scale processes on rural livelihoods merit examination at various levels of analysis. The nature of rural economic change over the past few decades is an active topic of research (Barkley, 1993; Falk & Lobao, 2003; Galston & Baehler, 1995; McGranahan, 2003), as are the linkages between economic, demographic and social change (Castle, 1995; Fuguitt et al., 1989). However, the increasing pace of global change, especially over the past 10 years, presents new challenges to rural Americans and their way of life. In this chapter we consider the nature of nonmetropolitan economic change in the last 30 years by examining links between the rural and global economies, exploring internal restructuring in specific sectors of the rural economy, and outlining repercussions of these changes for employment and income in various U.S. regions. The last 30 years brought significant sectoral shifts in rural employment within the United States (see Figure 4.1). Using data from the Regional Economic Information System (REIS) throughout our analysis, we identify three broad sectors that now comprise well over three quarters of all nonmetropolitan employment (Bureau of Economic Analysis, 2003). These include agriculture, manufacturing, and the tertiary sector consisting of transportation, communications and public