Rural Industrial Growth in the 1960's

This article relies on unpublished data from ongoing research and various special industry and small-area studies to assay dimensions and explore impacts on rural America of greatly accelerated industrial decentralization in the 1960's. Similar sources identify better highways and local services and facilities, and changing markets, products, and technologies as moti-vating forces. Brief attention is given to implications for population change, family and community well-being, and assimilation of poorly educated and unskilled rural people into today's economic mainstream. ADDITION S to manufacturing and other non-farm jobs in the 1960's in the UnitedStates greatly increased close-to-home work opportunities for farm and other rural peo-ple. About half of the gains. in manufacturing employment in the smaller or nonmetropolitan labor market areas, or approximately 20 percent of the national total, stemmed from new plant lo-cations or expansions in entirely and partly rural communities. ' Among major contributory factors were: (1) progress on the Interstate Highway System; (2) improvements in processing, market-ing, and transportation technologies; and (3) in-creasing attractiveness of today's small cities and towns as places to work and live. Accompanying changes were a significant broadening of indus-trial mix, as well as sharp rises in productivity, wage scales, and income. Urgently needed addi-tions to local services remain for future determi-nation. Adding impetus to recent gains in employment and payrolls was the greatly accelerated move-ment of manufacturing and other jobs to subur-ban, satellite, and outlying communities in the Detroit, Chicago, and certain other metropolitan complexes, and to smaller metropolitan areas elsewhere [14, 27, 29]. Far more so than previ-ously, decentralization extended not only to the larger urban centers outside metropolitan Amer-ica but to smaller cities and towns [5, 10, 16, 18, 32,41]. In the older industrial districts, such reactiva-tion of standby plants and replacement or mod-*The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Economic Re