Explaining Persistent Poverty in Certain Regions in the US

A recent paper I wrote (published in the Southern Economic Journal) with Jim Ziliak and Jenny Minier of the University of Kentucky investigates the underlying causes of persistent poverty in certain regions of the US. The following map of the US shows the counties with poverty rate of over 20 percent from 1959-1999 (using the official definition of poverty in the US):

The counties are not scattered around the US; instead they are located in five specific regions of the US: the central Appalachian region, the Black Belt region, the Mississippi Delta, the Texas colonias and the counties with Native American reservations in the western parts of the US. In this paper, we looked at why these regions have seen such high levels of persistent poverty for such long periods of time. 


We find that most of the differences in income between the poor and non-poor counties is due to lower levels of factors of production in the poor counties. However, the more important result we find is the importance of human capital in explaining persistent poverty. Current level of human capital (proxied by the proportion of people over 25 years of age with a high-school education or higher), along with past levels of human capital (proxied by the proportion of adults who cannot read or write in 1900) explain 60 percent of the differences in average income between the persistently-poor and non-poor counties. Thus, promoting education in the persistently-poor counties could help to reduce some of the large income gap we see between the persistently poor and non-poor counties.