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Abstract
The declining economy of the Northeastern portion of the United States and the concomitant economic growth of the Southern and Southwestern states have been fueled by a major redistribution of population and jobs. Both academics and journalists have displayed considerable interest in describing and explaining the general nature of the "power shift." However, it has become clear that this general picture of the Sunbelt-Snowbelt rivalry ignores recent and historical tendencies toward uneven development both across and within regions. Yet existing literature has not attempted to adequately examine economic structure and change at the regional and subregional level in order to more fully understand the consequences of these recent uneven changes in the geographic base of the U.S. economy. Therefore, this study draws on past research on uneven regional economic change and on the labor market consequences of economic structure in order to examine the effect of geographic variation in economic structure on one labor market outcome--unemployment. This research focuses most heavily on one dimension of economic structure (industrial segments) and a single outcome (unemployment) because of its exploratory nature.
The 1970 Census of Population and the 1976 Survey of Income and Education are used to examine how changes in the economic structure of the United States are related to female and male unemployment. Support is found for the relationship between industrial segments and unemployment although the strengths of these relationships vary across measures and between females and males. These findings have interesting implications for the study of regional change, labor market outcomes, and female and male unemployment.
