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Journal Article
New from the Richmond Fed’s Regional Matters blog
Briefing
Declining access to health care in northern New England
Access to health care is a major concern across the northern New England states?Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont?where rising operating costs and population loss threaten the stability of hospitals and other medical facilities that serve their surrounding rural communities. New analysis of financial data shows that many rural hospitals are operating at losses that are predictive of financial distress or even closure. Consequently, the communities served by these hospitals may be at risk of losing the benefits they provide to public health and the local economy. Addressing the financial ...
Discussion Paper
Shifting Rurality: Is it Possible to Increase Population and Become More Rural?
In January, the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Economic Research Service (USDA-ERS) released the 2023 update of the Rural-Urban Continuum Codes (RUCCs), resulting in changes for many counties, including those in the Fifth District. The USDA-ERS developed the nine-code classification system in 1974 to identify a county's level of rurality based on its degree of urbanization and adjacency to a metro area: RUCC 1 is the least rural, and RUCC 9 is the most rural. Following each decennial census, the USDA-ERS does a full update of the RUCCs to reflect population and metro/nonmetro area changes. ...
Journal Article
Employment Barriers in the Rural Fifth District
In Virginia, 75 percent of working-age adults are employed, in line with the national average of 74 percent. But there are significant disparities across geographies. In Loudoun County, Va., in the Washington, D.C., metro area, the share is 84.1 percent. On the other side of the state, in Lee County, just 48.2 percent of working-age adults are employed. This is true of many socioeconomic indicators: Aggregation is necessary to understand broad outcomes, but with aggregation, we lose important geographic distinctions and, thus, the opportunity to identify both challenges and solutions. This is ...
Discussion Paper
Are Labor Shortages in Small Cities and Rural Areas Worse Than Urban Ones?
In the past, the Richmond Fed has reported about the difficulty of businesses finding workers with the right skills. In conversations with business leaders across the Fifth District, we have heard about labor availability challenges across all geographies: in large urban centers, small cities, and rural areas. This post examines how labor availability differs between small cities and rural areas versus large urban centers. We find that the COVID-19 pandemic made it harder for firms in small cities and rural areas to find workers compared to firms in urban areas. Perhaps because of the ...
Briefing
Can Immigration Help Boost Rural Economies in the Fifth District and Beyond
We examine the role of immigration in rural areas. While immigrants tend to concentrate in urban areas, rural areas also significantly benefit from immigration. Agricultural firms, for example, need to hire many immigrants to help with harvesting crops. Past restrictions to immigration in rural areas haven't proven to be very effective in boosting native worker employment in these areas. First, firms respond to such restrictions by investing in new technologies at the expense of labor. Also, native workers seem unwilling to take many jobs in rural areas, which makes immigrants particularly ...
Newsletter
What is driving the differences in inflation across U.S. regions?
In this article, we explore differences in inflation dynamics across U.S. regions. Looking independently at the impact of consumption patterns and inflation by expenditure categories, we find that recent gaps across regions have existed largely because of different regional inflation rates for the housing category. Yet we also find that overall inflation is very highly correlated across regions.
Briefing
Commuting Patterns and Characteristics of Fifth District Counties
This article extends our previous work on the categorization of counties in the Fifth District based on their economic connectivity. Using commuting patterns to proxy for connectivity, we group counties into four categories. We next compare our classification with the USDA/ERS RUCC classification system. Finally, we characterize each category using different socioeconomic indicators. We claim that the information conveyed by this study is relevant when designing regionally targeted policies.
Briefing
Aging and declining populations in northern New England: is there a role for immigration?
In hundreds of communities across northern New England, the population is aging rapidly and becoming smaller. The entire country is aging, but northern New England stands out: Among the populations of all US states, those of Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont have the top-three highest median ages, respectively. The situation is even more extreme in northern New England?s rural counties, where the populations of the smallest towns generally are substantially older than those of the rest of the region. These communities also have seen the slowest, or even negative, population growth over the ...
Discussion Paper
Increasing Rural Capacity: Ways Intermediaries Can Contribute
Intermediary organizations provide a wide range of services that can help rural and small-town communities (no matter how we define rural or small town) to improve regional outcomes. Intermediaries are place-based, which means that they focus on a specific community or geography. They can operate at a local, regional, state, or multistate level and act as conveners of other organizations. In addition, they can serve as a link between local organizations and state or national resources.