Economic Restructuring, Moehr
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increased prosperity, and of all the sectors typical of the new economy, retail trade
demonstrated the most consistent link across models to positive net migration and
decreased poverty. Increased wages in some of the old economy, such as mining and
agriculture, actually showed increased poverty rates. However, the manufacturing and
construction sectors showed the strongest effects on decreasing poverty rates, so there
does seem to be an important role for the old sectors in a local economy. This conclusion
is situated in a growing body of critical analyses on national and international economic
restructuring.
Returning to some of the issues raised in the introduction, the results of this study
cast some significant doubt on the new economy of the United States. I would draw the
reader’s attention to two robust pieces of evidence: the spatial clustering of economic
change is a crucial aspect of modeling the 1990’s restructuring and while the service
sector appears to alleviate poverty more than extractive industries, its effect is
consistently smaller than old economy sectors such as manufacturing and construction.
Many authors have noted that the economic transition has not created an equitable
distribution of wealth within society or a pathway to long-term financial security for a
large portion of the population. Wright and Dwyer (2003), as mentioned above, came to
this basic conclusion while comparing the 1960s and 1990s. In addition, Barry Bluestone
and Bennett Harrison have contributed multiple works, which fundamentally question the
sustainability of American restructuring as it has occurred during the 70s, 80s, and 90s
(Bluestone & Harrison 1982; Harrison & Bluestone 1988; Bluestone & Harrison 2000).
My addition to this argument is to uncover some of the underlying problems with
economic restructuring in the 1990s. The decade is often seen as an extended economic
Convention