Low-Skill Employment and the Changing Economy of Rural America

Economic Research Report No. (ERR-10) 38 pp, October 2005

This study reports trends in rural low-skill employment in the 1990s and their impact on the rural workforce. The share of rural jobs classified as low-skill fell by 2.2 percentage points between 1990 and 2000, twice the decline of the urban low-skill employment share, but much less than the decline of the 1980s. Employment shifts from low-skill to skilled occupations within industries, rather than changes in industry mix, explain virtually all of the decline in the rural low-skill employment share. The share decline was particularly large for rural Black women, many of whom moved out of low-skill blue-collar work into service occupations, while the share of rural Hispanics who held low-skill jobs increased.

Keywords: rural labor markets, low-skill employment, job skills, human capital, industry, occupation, economic development

In this publication...

• Report summary,   91 kb | HTML
• Abstract, Acknowledgments, Contents, and Summary,   75 kb
• Introduction,   44 kb
• Data and Methods,   44 kb
• Rural America and the Prevalence of Low-Skill Employment,   51 kb
• Rural Low-Skill Employment Declines Outpace the Nation’s,   79 kb
• Structural Factors Driving Rural Low-Skill Employment Trends in the 1990s,   133 kb
• How Rural Low-Skill Change in the 1990s Compares with the 1980s,   49 kb
• Implications of Low-Skill Employment Trends for Rural Workers,   70 kb
• Conclusions,   44 kb
• References,   43 kb
• Appendix,   80 kb
• Entire Document,   464 kb

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