Print-Friendly Version    

The Hispanic population of nonmetro or rural America doubled between 1980 and 2000, from 1.4 million to 2.7 million of 46 million rural residents. The US has 2,052 nonmetro counties, and Hispanics are at least 10 percent of residents in 287 counties.

A third of the Hispanics in nonmetro counties in 2003 were born abroad, and their demographic characteristics were markedly different from nonmetro non-Hispanic whites. The median age of nonmetro Hispanics was 28, compared to 38 for nonmetro whites, and only six percent of nonmetro Hispanics were over 65, compared with 18 percent of nonmetro non-Hispanic whites.

About 86 percent of nonmetro non-Hispanic whites had a high-school diploma in 2003, compared to 53 percent of nonmetro Hispanics. The median household income of nonmetro Hispanics was $31,500 in 2003, compared to $43,800 for nonmetro households headed by whites. Nonmetro Hispanic households were more likely to participate in Medicaid, WIC and Food Stamp programs and less likely to participate in Medicare.

Rural Development. Rural development theory has gone through three major phases in the past half century: industrial recruitment, cost-cutting and competitive advantage. The 1950s through 1980s was an era of smokestack chasing, as rural areas sought factories to manufacture products that could be exported from the area to generate a stream of income. This was followed by the cost-cutting era in the 1980s, when mobile firms were attracted to rural areas with tax incentives as well as lower rural wages.

Today, many rural areas are seeking their competitive advantage. Many rural areas continue to provide incentives to attract businesses, but a globalizing economy reduced the appeal of a development strategy based on low costs. Today's rural development policies aim to foster innovation to fuel entrepreneurship with clusters of similar firms that learn from and feed off each other, pools of creative people that spawn innovations, and to attract entrepreneurs who create new businesses. There is no one-size-fits-all development strategy for rural areas.