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Lookup NU author(s): Emeritus Professor Mark Shucksmith OBE
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-ND).
Rural areas of England have lower poverty rates than urban areas, in contrast to many other countries. To understand why, and how this has changed under austerity policies, we use logistic regression to examine the effects of rural-urban residence type, individual socio-economic and demographic characteristics, and changes in government policies on the likelihood of being poor in England. We group Understanding Society Survey (USS) respondents into three residence types (Predominantly Rural; Significant Rural; and Predominantly Urban), and link these USS data with local authority district (LA) level information on changes in councils' spending power, in service spending and in per capita income lost from cuts to welfare benefits since 2010. Our results Demonstrate that rural residence provides a buffer against poverty, a so-called "rural advantage effect", but that this is reduced or becomes non-significant by controlling for these other variables. The rural advantage effect is especially strong in Significant Rural areas, usually rural areas with good access to urban opportunities. Furthermore, working age poverty has increased more rapidly in rural areas than urban between 2010-18, Hence, people derive less protection from poverty by virtue of living in rural areas, especially in Predominantly Rural areas, than was the case pre-2010. Our analysis also reveals how national policies have differential spatial impacts on local populations according to their diverse characteristics.
Author(s): Vera-Toscano E, Shucksmith M, Brown D, Brown H
Publication type: Article
Publication status: Published
Journal: Regional Studies
Year: 2024
Volume: 58
Issue: 6
Pages: 1264-1281
Online publication date: 11/08/2023
Acceptance date: 07/07/2023
Date deposited: 03/10/2023
ISSN (print): 0034-3404
ISSN (electronic): 1360-0591
Publisher: Routledge
URL: https://doi.org/10.1080/00343404.2023.2235374
DOI: 10.1080/00343404.2023.2235374
Data Access Statement: The data analysed in this study are all publicly available: for the Understanding Society dataset, see https://www.understandingsociety.ac.uk/documentation; see https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/core-spending-power-final-local-government-finance-settlement-2019-to-2020 for local authorities’ core spending power, and see the Institute for Fiscal Studies (https://ifs.org.uk/publications/8781) for their service spending; for the data on the financial impact of welfare reforms, see https://www4.shu.ac.uk/research/cresr/ourexpertise/the-uneven-impact-of-welfare-reform; and for The Rural Urban Local Authority Classification data, see https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/2011-rural-urban-classification-of-local-authority-and-other-higher-level-geographies-for-statistical-purposes/.
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