ABSTRACT
Introduction Understanding the causes of community-level population change is not only of interest to academics but has profound implications for social well-being and public policy design. North American communities have had widely varying and persistent growth and decline experiences. Hinterland rural communities, especially those tied to the primary sector, are persistently losing residents, most notably in the young labor force age groups (Rothwell et al. 2002). Without a critical mass of population, some rural communities enter a vicious cycle of decline, as illustrated by trends in the rural Great Plains and Atlantic Canada (e.g., Mwansa and Bollman 2005). Conversely, many large urban centers, outlying suburbs, and exurban communities are experiencing rapid growth (Glaeser and Kahn 2003). The resulting urban sprawl can strain infrastructure, denigrate green space, infringe on farmland, and create congestion, all of which can adversely affect quality of life. Thus, a better understanding of the underlying influences on community growth would inform both rural and urban economic development planning, as well as land use and environmental concerns. Explanations for community population growth and decline can be seen as part of the “jobs” versus “people” debate: do regions grow because firms create jobs and people follow, or do people move to a region for quality-of-life reasons and the jobs follow (Partridge and Rickman 2003a, 2006). The most obvious causal factor of population change is the local community’s economic strength, which often relates to whether the region has a mix of industries that are faring well nationally (Partridge and Rickman 1996; Simon 2004). For example, agriculture-reliant communities have generally struggled for decades. Other theories stress the role of agglomeration economies consistent with higher firm productivity and the provision of the highest order urban amenities such as upscale shopping, cultural and recreational venues (Glaese et al. 2001; Krugman 1991; Rosenthal and Strange 2001). Akin to endogenous growth theories, still other hypotheses stress the role of local concentrations of human capital in increasing local productivity, inducing long periods of population growth (Romer 1994; Simon and Nardinelli 2002).
