Small Manufacturing and Nonmetropolitan Socioeconomic Well-Being

Abstract

We build on earlier work by Mills and Ulmer in which characteristics of the local economic base, particularly establishment size, were related to civic welfare. They posit that small business is ‘good’ for local community welfare, whereas big business is ‘bad’ for it. Data from County Business Patterns and various population censuses are used to examine this issue for US nonmetropolitan counties. With regression procedures adjusted for spatial autocorrelation across counties, we find support for the Mills and Ulmer hypothesis for three measures of civic welfare.