IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/ags/uersra/289785.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Racial and Spatial Equity in Welfare Programs Interstate and Intercounty Differences in Welfare Spending

Author

Listed:
  • Nord, Mark

Abstract

States where a large proportion of the poor are rural residents or racial/ethnic minorities offered lower levels of welfare support under the Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program than did other States. No corresponding rural or racial/ethnic disadvantages are observed in the Food Stamp Program, which has standard eligibility criteria and benefit levels nationwide. The rural AFDC disadvantage could be accounted for by the fact that States with lower per capita income and higher poverty rates generally offered less generous AFDC benefit levels. The minority disadvantage was substantial even when the effects of State per capita income and poverty rate were controlled. Among counties within States, on the other hand, there is no evidence that rural counties or counties with high proportions of minority population fared worse than other counties. Household- level analyses corroborate the county-level findings in general, except that they point to substantial underuse of AFDC by rural Hispanics. The findings suggest that national welfare program standards are important for maintaining or improving equity in welfare access and highlight the importance of progressive funding of block grants. They also suggest that the rural and minority poor have an important stake in the design of State welfare programs.

Suggested Citation

  • Nord, Mark, 1998. "Racial and Spatial Equity in Welfare Programs Interstate and Intercounty Differences in Welfare Spending," Rural America/ Rural Development Perspectives, United States Department of Agriculture, Economic Research Service, vol. 13(3), October.
  • Handle: RePEc:ags:uersra:289785
    DOI: 10.22004/ag.econ.289785
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/289785/files/rdp1098b.pdf
    Download Restriction: no

    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.22004/ag.econ.289785?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Linda Lobao & David S. Kraybill, 2005. "The Emerging Roles of County Governments in Metropolitan and Nonmetropolitan Areas: Findings From a National Survey," Economic Development Quarterly, , vol. 19(3), pages 245-259, August.
    2. Kraybill, David S. & Lobao, Linda, 2001. "The Emerging Roles of County Governments in Rural America: Findings from a Recent National Survey," 2001 Annual meeting, August 5-8, Chicago, IL 20697, American Agricultural Economics Association (New Name 2008: Agricultural and Applied Economics Association).

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ags:uersra:289785. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: AgEcon Search (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/ersgvus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.