SMALL MANUFACTURING AND NONMETROPOLITAN SOCIOECONOMIC WELL-BEING

We build on earlier work by Mills and Ulmer in which characteristics o f the local economic base, particularly establishment size, were relat ed to civic welfare. They posit that small business is 'good' for loca l community welfare, whereas big business is 'bad' for it. Data from C ounty Business Patterns and various population censuses are used to ex amine this issue for US nonmetropolitan counties. With regression proc edures adjusted for spatial autocorrelation across counties, we find s upport for the Mills and Ulmer hypothesis for three measures of civic welfare.