抄録
In general considerably more is known about the geography of economic levels (variates) than the geography of economic relationships (covariates). While place-specific factors are known to affect the sizes of local or regional multipliers, it is not known how these multipliers systematically vary from one place to the next.This paper examines geographic variation in the sizes of (aggregate) economic base multipliers during the years 1980, 1990, and especially 2000. Employment multipliers are estimated for hundreds of micropolitan counties found across the U.S. in the 48 contiguous states. These economies occupy an intermediate position in size and complexity between less dense rural economies and more dense metropolitan economies.The spatial expansion method is adapted to estimate the spatial heterogeneity in the key relationship between nonbasic (local) and basic (export) jobs across the micropolitan counties. Non-earnings income also has an important effect on the spatial attributes of this relationship and less important effects are identified for human capital and industrial specialization. These regression results are in turn used to estimate the properties of a continuous spatial surface for micropolitan multipliers. The properties of this surface changed during the study period 1980-2000 as the micropolitan counties grew in size, the national space-economy was restructured, and the effects of non-earnings income became more pervasive.
JEL Classification: R11, R12, R15
