Volume 4, Number 1 (Winter) 1969
Kee, Woo Sik. 1969. "The Causes of Urban Poverty." Journal of Human Resources 4(1): 93-99.
Recent empirical studies on the incidence of poverty, although very extensive, have not been completely satisfactory partly because they have been limited to an evaluation of the validity of the backwash thesis--the thesis that poverty will not substantially disappear with economic growth--and partly because they failed to use an inclusive proxy measure of poverty. The objective of this study is to estimate the number of the poor for each of the 36 largest Standard Metropolitan Statistical Areas (SMSA's) in accordance with a modified Social Security Administration poverty index. Then, by incorporating the influence of labor force participation rate, migration, job discrimination against nonwhite workers, and percentage of poorly educated adults into a multiple regression analysis, an attempt is made to explain the variations in poverty incidence among SMSA's.
West Virginia University.
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