Appalachian Legacy: Economic Opportunity after the War on Poverty
216
Appalachian Legacy: Economic Opportunity after the War on Poverty
216Overview
In 1964 President Lyndon Johnson traveled to Kentucky's Martin County to declare war on poverty. The following year he signed the Appalachian Regional Development Act, creating a state-federal partnership to improve the region's economic prospects through better job opportunities, improved human capital, and enhanced transportation. As the focal point of domestic antipoverty efforts, Appalachia took on special symbolic as well as economic importance. Nearly half a century later, what are the results? Appalachian Legacy provides the answers.
Led by James P. Ziliak, prominent economists and demographers map out the region's current status. They explore important questions, including how has Appalachia fared since the signing of ARDA in 1965? How does it now compare to the nation as a whole in key categories such as education, employment, and health? Was ARDA an effective place-based policy for ameliorating hardship in a troubled region, or is Appalachia still mired in a poverty trap? And what lessons can we draw from the Appalachian experience?
In addition to providing the reports of important research to help analysts, policymakers, scholars, and regional experts discern what works in fighting poverty, Appalachian Legacy is an important contribution to the economic history of the eastern United States.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780815722151 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 02/24/2012 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 216 |
| File size: | 4 MB |
About the Author
James P. Ziliak holds the Carol Martin Gatton Endowed Chair in Microeconomics at the University of Kentucky, where he is also director of the Center for Poverty Research. He is the editor of Welfare Reform and Its Long-Term Consequences for America's Working Poor (Cambridge University Press, 2009).
Read an Excerpt
APPALACHIAN LEGACY
Economic Opportunity after the War on PovertyBROOKINGS INSTITUTION PRESS
Copyright © 2012 JAMES P. ZILIAKAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8157-2215-1
Chapter One
JAMES P. ZILIAKIntroduction: Progress and Prospects for Appalachia
Appalachia is a region apart—both geographically and statistically. President's Appalachian Regional Commission, 1964
Much of the Southern Appalachians is as underdeveloped, when compared with the affluence of the rest of the nation, as the newly independent countries of Africa. Julius Duscha, 19601
IN APRIL 1964 PRESIDENT Lyndon Johnson traveled to Martin County, Kentucky, in the heart of Appalachia to launch the nation's War on Poverty. Within a year—with passage of the Appalachian Regional Development Act of 1965 (ARDA)—Appalachia was designated as a special economic zone. The act created a federal and state partnership known as the Appalachian Regional Commission (ARC), whose mission is to expand the economic opportunities of the area's residents by increasing job opportunities, human capital, and transportation. The ARC-designated region is depicted by its 1967 boundaries and associated subregions in figure 1-1. The ARC region covers the Appalachian Mountains from southern New York to northern Mississippi and spans parts of twelve states and all of West Virginia. As of 2010, 420 counties were included in Appalachia (23 more than in 1967), and over $23 billion had been spent on the region through the auspices of ARDA; roughly half of the funds were from ARC and the remainder were from other federal, state, and local programs.
Five decades later, is there evidence of a convergence between Appalachia and the rest of the nation? As a place-based policy was ARDA effective at ameliorating hardship in the region? Or is Appalachia caught in a poverty trap? Do the urban areas of the region offer growth opportunities for the highly skilled? If not, what policies could attract such workers and firms and at whose expense? The answers to these and related questions are important not only for a better understanding of the enduring legacy of the War on Poverty in Appalachia but also for antipoverty policy in general as the United States confronts a rising tide of poverty and inequality.
The authors in this volume look back over the past several decades to examine whether, where, and how progress has been made in terms of earnings, income, poverty, education, and health in Appalachia compared to the nation overall. They not only inform us of past successes and failures of policy and the broader social science research underpinning the analyses, but they also point us toward gaps in research knowledge as well as toward policy options going forward. The authors suggest that a new commitment to investment in human and physical capital through expanded prekindergarten programs, public health campaigns, and regionally focused infrastructure improvements in higher education and tourism- oriented industries is likely to offer the greatest long-term payoff for Appalachia and for similarly depressed regions of the nation.
A Region Apart
During the early 1960s poverty, and in particular Appalachian poverty, entered the American consciousness with the classic works of Michael Harrington's The Other America and Harry Caudill's Night Comes to the Cumberlands. Indeed, the case for action gained steam during the 1960 West Virginia presidential primary when the future president, John F. Kennedy, witnessed firsthand the stark deprivation facing the region. At the time more than half of West Virginians lived in poverty, many suffered from malnutrition, and basic amenities such as indoor plumbing were the exception in the rural areas. In 1960 county poverty rates were on average 10 percentage points higher in Appalachia than in the rest of the country (figure 1-2). In the Central Appalachian counties in Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia, and West Virginia poverty rates approached 60 percent, or nearly double the rate outside Appalachia.
At the same time real per capita income in Central Appalachian counties lagged not only the nation as a whole but even its neighbors in the Northern Appalachian region by $2,800 per person (figure 1-3). Part of the reason for deep poverty and low incomes in Central Appalachia owed to the fact that high school completion rates, which stood at about 17 percent in 1960, were about 20 percentage points lower than the remainder of the country. The level of hardship led Kennedy in 1963 to establish the President's Appalachian Regional Commission (PARC) to develop a comprehensive economic development program for the region. The PARC, chaired by Franklin D. Roosevelt Jr., submitted its report to President Johnson in 1964. The report states, with no hint of exaggeration, that Appalachia was "a region apart."
Congress agreed with PARC's basic assessment of Appalachia in the passing of ARDA as Public Law 89-4 on March 9, 1965. The act opens with the following language:
The Congress hereby finds and declares that the Appalachian region of the United States, while abundant in natural resources and rich in potential, lags behind the rest of the Nation in its economic growth and that its people have not shared properly in the Nation's prosperity. The region's uneven past development, with its historic reliance on a few basic industries and a marginal agriculture, has failed to provide the economic base that is a vital prerequisite for vigorous, self-sustaining growth.
In addition to creating ARC, the act established several new transportation and human development programs, such as the Appalachian Development Highway System and regional health clinics and vocational education centers. The initial congressional appropriation to ARC was about $1.1 billion, with about three- fourths of it dedicated to highway construction. Although the initial investment in human development programs seemed low given the high levels of poverty in the region, Congress and the Johnson administration were simultaneously expanding the broader social safety net with the introduction of food stamps, Medicaid, Medicare, Head Start, and other targeted programs for low-income families, and thus from their perspective the additional funds made available in ARDA were to complement the wider investment in human capital.
Progress was made in the ensuing four decades to reduce the abject poverty found in much of Appalachia in the 1960s. By 2000 poverty rates had fallen in all of the United States, including Appalachia (figure 1-4), while real per capita incomes and high school attainment increased across the board (figure 1-5). Moreover there is some indication of convergence, as the Appalachian poverty rate in 2000 was about 20 percent higher than the rest of the country, down from 30 percent higher in 1960. Most notably, poverty rates in Central Appalachia plummeted from 58 percent in 1960 to 23 percent in 2000. Additionally, the high school attainment gap narrowed, especially between the rest of the nation and Northern and Southern Appalachia. There is little doubt that the progressive changes were palpable.
However, the region continues to lag behind the rest of the nation on many measures of economic development and health, and parts of Central Appalachia share lingering characteristics of a poverty trap. While levels of poverty fell dramatically in the Central region, the rate is still roughly double the rate of the rest of the nation. Real per capita incomes in the Central region are now $4,000 below those outside Appalachia, or $1,200 more than in 1960, and the gap in high school completion rates narrowed only slightly. Thus the shared regionwide convergence envisioned by the President's Appalachian Commission appears to have bypassed the Central region. And perhaps because of the searing portraits of grinding poverty in the books by Caudill and Harrington, to this day Appalachia, or at least the Central region, is often viewed as "the other America."
A number of excellent accounts of Appalachia and of ARC provide a rich historical and sociological background on the region and thus will not be reexamined here. In contradistinction, there is a paucity of research by economists and demographers on Appalachia, and this is the point of departure for this book. Guided by rigorous theoretical underpinnings, the authors provide extensive evidence on earnings and inequality, human capital, health disparities, economic development programs, and poverty—and the way the Appalachian region has fared in relation to the country overall since the 1960s.
Progress against Poverty
Should policymakers subsidize firms, industries, or even regions (such as Appalachia)? Unlike most other OECD nations, policymakers in the United States have had an uneasy relationship with so-called place-based economic policy. Economists generally agree that industrial policy is often not welfare improving for local citizens. Instead, they argue in favor of investing in people, not in places or firms. And yet we regularly see governments engage in place-based investments, such as a city or state providing tax subsidies to a firm for locating an industrial plant in its jurisdiction.
One of the earliest, and subsequently longest running, efforts at regional economic development came about from passage of ARDA. However, there have been few attempts to formally test whether or not the program improved the lives of Appalachians. Thus the book begins with an evaluation of the effect of ARDA on economic progress in Appalachia. In chapter 2 James Ziliak assembles county- level data from the 1960 and 2000 decennial censuses on poverty, per capita income, education, labor force growth, and other variables. His analysis improves upon prior efforts to evaluate ARDA by including data five years before passage of the act, thus placing the Appalachian and comparison counties on a prereform baseline (instead of postreform, as in earlier studies).
Ziliak finds that ARDA reduced Appalachian poverty between 1960 and 2000 by 7.6 percentage points relative to the rest of the country and by 4 percentage points relative to border counties, with half to two-thirds of the effect realized within the first five years of the act's passage. These antipoverty gains were most pronounced in Central Appalachia, where poverty rates fell by 5–16 percentage points, depending on the comparison group. Additionally, he presents strong evidence of convergence in per capita income growth rates, resulting in 14 percent faster growth overall and about 25 percent faster growth in Central and Southern Appalachia compared to the rest of the country. The results suggest that ARDA did succeed in reducing hardship and boosting income growth. However, other forces caused the region—especially Central and Northern Appalachia, to diverge from the country in terms of income level.
It is well documented that inequality of earnings has increased since the 1970s, with the most pronounced increase in the 1980s. In this literature, understanding the role of skill levels, and the market returns to those skills, has been at the core of the research effort. This literature links the growth in inequality to expanding wage premiums paid to college graduates, rising returns to unobserved skills, and the skill composition of the workforce, among others. Recent work suggests a polarization of the earnings structure in the United States: the rich are gaining and the middle class is falling further behind. The inequality research to date, however, is comparatively silent on earnings inequality within and between geographic regions, including whether the polarization of the earnings distribution within and between regions holds equally or whether it differs between urban and rural areas. Knowledge of differences in inequality within and between regions is important for understanding widening inequality in general and for considering regional policy responses in particular.
In chapter 3, Dan Black and Seth Sanders use a special tabulation of the 1960–2000 internal long form of the decennial census to construct county-level earnings profiles of men at multiple points of the distribution. They find that in 1960 prime-age working men in Appalachia earned 80 percent as much as their peers in the rest of the country. Some forty years later that ratio has barely moved. But breaking down the era into two twenty-year time periods tells a different story. In 1980 men in Appalachia earned 85 percent of those outside the region, an increase attributable to the boom in the coal industry in the 1960s and 1970s. In the subsequent two decades inflation-adjusted income among men in Appalachia continued to grow, but without the engine of a booming coal sector, it lagged growth in the rest of the country and so sank to 81 percent in 2000. This same pattern holds in Central Appalachia but not in Northern and Southern Appalachia: wages were stable in the North between 1960 and 1980 and then fell thereafter, while in the South they increased progressively across the four decades.
Even more provocative, Black and Sanders find that there are large differences between rural and urban areas in earnings distribution and that this is the principal reason that Appalachia's earnings distribution differs from the rest of the country. The bottom half of the earnings distribution increased in rural counties between 1960 and 1980 both in absolute terms and relative to the bottom half in urban areas. But between 1980 and 2000 urban areas exhibited far more polarization of earnings than rural areas. Echoing the findings in chapter 2, Black and Sanders argue that a key factor underlying these trends in earnings is slower growth in educational attainment, especially at the baccalaureate and professional levels, suggesting that a key to long-term improvement in the economic status of Appalachian men is to invest more in the types of advanced education needed to compete in the global economy.
In addition to macroeconomic forces placing upward pressure on poverty and inequality, secular changes in the structure of the American family are another possible causal mechanism. It is widely known that children growing up in a single-parent family (usually the mother) are at much great risk of poverty than children growing up with both parents present (nationally, poverty rates among single-parent, female-headed families are three times higher their two-parent counterparts). But in 1960 only 5 percent of children were born to single women, while in 2004, that share was 36 percent.
In chapter 4, Daniel Lichter and Lisa Cimbaluk document that recent changes in family structure, especially the rise in female-headed families, have placed upward demographic pressure on poverty rates nationally and that Appalachian families and children have not been immune to the economic consequences of declining marriage rates, high rates of nonmarital fertility, and rising numbers of female-headed families, especially in rural areas. They find that the implications of these family changes for family poverty are larger in Appalachia than in non-Appalachia areas, independent of regional differences in employment opportunities, industrial structure, demographic variables, and other factors. Moreover, family effects, notably those associated with changing female roles, are estimated to be larger than those for conventional economic and human capital variables. Their simulations suggest that from 1990 to 2009 changes in family poverty would have been roughly 15–20 percent lower than the observed poverty rate if Appalachian families had not changed since 1990. This suggests that, in addition to policies that encourage economic growth, policies that encourage healthy marriages may help reduce poverty.
Future Challenges for Appalachia
Research increasingly indicates that poor health in childhood may be important in transmitting health disparities across the income distribution later in life and that these links are especially pronounced among individuals from lower socioeconomic backgrounds. Indeed, this process likely starts from poor maternal health while the child is in utero. The fetal origins hypothesis implies that conditions in utero affect not only birth weight but features such as basic metabolism, which in turn affect future health. This may be particularly problematic for families in Appalachia, who tend to be poorer and in worse health than other Americans.
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Excerpted from APPALACHIAN LEGACY Copyright © 2012 by JAMES P. ZILIAK. Excerpted by permission of BROOKINGS INSTITUTION PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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