The Nonmetropolitan South in the 1990s: Convergence or Stagnation?

For the past 25 years, members of this Association, together with a few select nonmembers, have made major contributions to the theory and measurement of regional economic growth and development and to the development and implementation of regional, state, and local economic development policy. However, the question of whether those theories of regional growth and development can lead to unequivocal policy recommendations for a region like the nonmetropolitan South remains unresolved. Will there continue to be inevitable marketdirected convergence in wages and per capita personal income as predicted by the staunchest neoclassical believers, those described as “neoclassical moonies” by Richardson (see Miernyk, 1982)? Or will the nonmetropolitan South continue forever to be on the end of the product cycle described by Norton and Rees (1979)? Or will the agglomerative and exogeneous forces described by Williamson (1980) and Hansen (1972) lead to divergence between metropolitan and nonmetropolitan wages and per capita incomes? Or, will the future story of the nonmetropolitan South be some combination of the above?