ABSTRACT
This chapter begins with a summary of political and economic forces that initially fostered an urban concentration of manufacturing activity. It provides the post-World War II dispersal of this activity. The chapter reviews factors associated with past concentration and decentralization movements provides insight into the potential impacts of structural changes. Small businesses, producer services, and high-tech manufacturing, the growth sectors of the 1980s, have demonstrated a marked preference for urban locations. Past reliance of nonmetro areas on low-wage labor as the temptress for routinized production has fostered a manufacturing environment that is disadvantaged against both import penetration and domestic small-batch manufacturing. Proponents of the long wave theory argue that the recent decline in rural economic activity is attributable to the initiation of a new recovery phase and the resulting redistribution of investments and resources to the developing growth centers.
