Economic structure and socioeconomic change in America's micropolitan areas, 1970-1997

Micropolitan areas, county-level geographic units with central cities larger than 15,000, represent a small but increasingly important part of the U.S. urban hierarchy. Despite the attraction of micropolitan areas to migrants, and increasing interest from federal policymakers who may soon officially recognize this geographic unit, little appears in the social science literature on the characteristics of these areas, and how they have evolved over time. In this paper, we examine micropolitan areas, focusing on economic structure and change over a 27 year time frame (1970-1997). The classification system we develop permits us to see structural change as it occurs in these geographic areas, while also allowing us to see how economic structure influences socioeconomic change over time. We find that micropolitan areas exhibit extraordinary diversity in terms of economic structure, and that economic structure explains much of the differential growth these areas have experienced over the last few decades. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science Inc. All rights reserved.