ABSTRACT
At the beginning of the 1980s, poverty, which had declined to 11.1% in 1973, had begun to creep upward again. By 1980, the average county poverty rate was 15.8%. Industrial restructuring of the late 1970s brought massive job losses in manufacturing that hit black men very hard. By the early 1980s, one in five black males was unemployed. In the 1980s, inflation and high interest rates resulted in a decline in corporate capital investment in new plant and equipment, which led to high unemployment rates and poverty levels not seen since the 1960s. Elderly poverty rates continued to decline from the previous decade. Rates began to rise for female-headed households with children and young men and women.
