U.S. Commuting Networks and Economic Growth: Measurement and Implications for Spatial Policy
Stephan J. Goetz is director of the Northeast Regional Center for Rural Development and Professor of Agricultural and Regional Economics at The Pennsylvania State University. Yicheol Han is researcher in the Department of Rural Systems Engineering at Seoul National University, Korea and former Visiting Scholar at the Northeast Center. Jill L. Findeis is Distinguished Professor of Agricultural, Environmental and Regional Economics, and Demography at Penn State University. Kathryn J. Brasier is Assistant Professor of Rural Sociology, also at Penn State University. The authors are deeply grateful to three anonymous reviewers for their extensive and very valuable comments on an earlier version of this article. Goetz, Findeis, and Brasier gratefully acknowledge support from The Pennsylvania State University, College of Agricultural Sciences, and the United States Department of Agriculture, National Institute of Food and Agriculture. Han's work was supported by a National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) grant, funded by the Korea government (MEST) (500—20090144).
ABSTRACT
Labor market areas (LMAs) have long been a staple of regional and urban analysis. As commuting patterns have expanded over time, these areas have become larger and more complex, and the dichotomous designation of a county either belonging to an LMA or not may no longer be adequate. We apply recent advances in network science to conduct a more refined analysis of U.S. commuting patterns, and examine their effects on local economic growth. Results show that network degree and entropy measures explain variations in county per capita income growth patterns. Higher in- and out-commuting entropies are associated with lower per capita income growth, but their interaction enhances economic growth in places simultaneously open to both in- and out-commuters. Using these results, common ground may be found for creating new forms of regional governance that better reflect local realities of cross-county border flows of workers and economic activity.
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