ABSTRACT
The American public generally perceives poverty as an urban problem. This probably stems from the fact that most people live in or near large cities and are likely to observe central city poverty. The rural poor are more dispersed and less visible. Statistics show, however, that poverty is as much a rural problem as an urban one. Not only did the nonmetro poverty rate decline in the early 1970s, but the gap between nonmetro and central city poverty rates also closed. By the late 1970s, the central city poverty rate exceeded the nonmetro poverty rate. Nonmetro areas appear to have experienced slow income growth compared to metro areas, leading to a growing metro-nonmetro income gap that is not correlated with the national business cycle. A major change in metro-nonmetro designations used by the Bureau of the Census may also help explain why the nonmetro poverty rate remained so high from 1983 to 1986.
