Abstract
Young people in rural areas are under-researched, and there is a particular paucity of studies on rural youth in the labour market. This paper addresses that dearth. I pose the research question: how does rural location affect the earnings of young people in full-time employment in Britain? I consider the background of rural disadvantage, and its specific effects on young people and outline the relevance of social capital to this topic, identifying norms and networks as the two constituent elements of the concept. Using data from the British Household Panel Survey Wave 17 (2007/8), I find that rural youth are paid less than urban counterparts. When coupled with higher living costs, this amounts to a double disadvantage for rural youth. Concerning social capital, I find that norms – in terms of trust in individuals, community and institutions – exert a significant effect on net pay. Conversely, despite prior research positing the importance of informal contacts for rural jobseekers, networks do not exhibit any significant effect on wages. This corroborates accounts of social capital as a protean concept, illustrating how one facet alters the likelihood of finding work, while the other facet determines outcomes once in employment.
Highlights
This article was downloaded by: [University of Birmingham] On: 14 May 2014, At: 08:05 Publisher: Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK
Without well-established local reputations and ‘untarnished family backgrounds’ people can be excluded from the crucial informal channels offering job opportunities (2008, 230). This idea was explored more explicitly by Mathews, Pendakur, and Young, who claim that jobseekers in rural areas use different means to find employment, arguing that ‘rural job-finding is strongly influenced by constraints on the labour market and on social capital and networks that do not exist in cities’ (2009, 308)
Perceptions of rural idyll and biases towards urban areas in terms of research may obscure the fact that rural youth can face difficulties different to those confronting urban counterparts, namely, limited opportunities and, as seen here, lower labour market returns
Summary
Britain’s rural population is older (Lowe and Speakman 2006; Hardill and Dwyer 2011), yet the rural advocate notes a decline in net out-migration of young people from rural areas (Burgess 2008b, 2). There have since been modest advances around this topic, such as Phimister, Theodossiou and Upward’s (2006) investigation of low-paid work in urban and rural areas, using British Household Panel Survey (BHPS) Waves 1Á8 (1991Á8) They find that ‘urban low-pay durations are somewhat shorter on average, with a higher probability of movement to a higher paid job’ (2006, 693) and that young people in rural areas are likelier to leave low-paid jobs for unemployment than urban peers, the differences are modest (2006, 708). The evidence suggests that rural Britain is home to more young people, who struggle to find permanent employment with good prospects and pay and are disadvantaged by the lack of affordable housing and public transport Research into this topic, in Britain, has been almost non-existent since Cartmel and Furlong’s study in 2000, despite the fact rural youth are seen to face difficulties which are both significant and distinct. I start with general definitions of the concept followed by its application to labour market outcomes, youth employment and rural areas
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