The Socioeconomics of Metro and Non-Metro Counties
Socioeconomics (also known as social economics) is the social science that studies how economic activity affects and is shaped by social processes. In general, it analyzes how modern societies progress, stagnate, or regress because of their local or regional economy, or the global economy. Societies are divided into 3 groups: social, cultural and economic. It also refers to the ways that social and economic factors influence the environment(Wikipedia).
Exploratory Data Analysis (EDA)
Data Source
The Economic Research Service (ERS) is a component of the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) and a principal agency of the Federal Statistical System of the United States. It provides information and research on agriculture and economics.
Data Wrangling
The Dataset was in an excel .xls format with 13 sheets of which I majorly used one while the others I used were more of a complementary data to the major Dataset containing variable definitions and supplementary data.
Let’s start with loading our data:
Here is what the data looks like when called:
The features or columns (take your pick) does not seem understandable to me and I’m placing a bet it doesn’t to you too so let’s get the feature names from the variables data and substitute it with the current feature names.
First, let’s a quick look at our variables data:
Uhmm….So it contains variables for all sheets in the excel file and we just need the variables related to the SOCIOECONOMIC dataset, let’s work on that
And we have….
The data makes a whole lot of sense now compared to the feature names we had earlier. The data contains 18 features of demographic indicators as shared by the U.S. Census Bureau 2010 Census, U.S. Census Bureau Small Area Income and Poverty Estimates — 2010 Data and USDA’s Economic Research Service. The estimated values cover 2010 mainly and partly 2015 and are described by Percentage of White, Percentage of Blacks, Metro and Non-metro counties, Percentage of Population of 65 years or older and others.
Features
The main feature which we’re going to focus on is the Metro and Non-metro Counties feature. So you probably have questions right now such as how does a county being a metro county or not affects the poverty rate, the population distribution and others, sincerely I want to answer your questions but I’m almost close to clueless on this topic but I know one thing we could do which is…….CONSULT OUR DATA.
Metro / Non-metro counties
Of all counties in the United States, 62.9% are Metro Counties while 37.1% are Non-metro Counties. That seems normal since the United States is a developed country and would have more metro counties than non-metro counties. From the definitions of Metro and Non-metro counties as defined by the USDA’s Economic Research Service — Rural Collections which is a sub-body of the research service our data was collected from “Metro areas include all counties containing one or more urbanized areas: high-density urban areas containing 50,000 people or more; metro areas also include outlying counties that are economically tied to the central counties, as measured by the share of workers commuting daily to the central counties” while “Non-metro counties are outside the boundaries of metro areas and have no cities with 50,000 residents or more”.
For further analysis let’s make our data more understandable by substituting instances of 1’s and 0’s to what they mean.
How does Metro or Non-Metro affect a county??
Poverty rate
The average Poverty Rate in Non-Metro County is visibly larger than the average Poverty Rate in Metro County. Non-Metro Counties have a higher poverty rate than their counterpart. Metro counties are more urbanized areas and urbanization as we know it provides more job opportunities’ to all individuals in the urban area be it young or old. According to our data feature definition Poverty Rate is defined as “Percentage of county residents with household income below the poverty threshold”.
Median Household Income
A Metro County has an approximate median income of $ 55022.5 while a Non-Metro County has an approximate median income of $ 44827.4. This is a distinguishable difference and this is major because there will be more lucrative jobs in a Metro County and for those individuals who are self-employed selling goods or offering services, they have a wider array of potential customers compared to their counterparts and also their potential customers tend to spend more than those in Non-Metro County since they earn more. According to our data definition of features “Median income by household is the income level that divides county households in half, one half with income above the median and the other half with income below the median; includes the income of all household members 15 years old or older.”
Persistent Poverty County
According to our data sources, counties are labelled as being “Poverty Persistent” when the poverty rate of residents was 20 per cent or more in 1980, 1990, and 2000 decennial censuses and the American Community Survey 5-year estimates for 2007–2011. Looking at our plot, the poverty rate in Non-Metro Counties was almost 6 times the poverty rate in Metro Counties. Of all the 353 counties that fell under the umbrella of being “Poverty Persistent”, 301 were Non-Metro Counties while the other 52 were from the Metro Counties. So I think it is safe to say Metro Counties have a much lower probability at being poverty persistent.
Population Loss
Population loss could be caused by a whole lot of factors ranging from death due to poor health facilities, increased suicide rate, and also immigration of people from one county to the other in search of greener pastures, schooling and a whole lot of reasons I can’t get to think of right now.
Of the Metro Counties, 62 counties experienced a population loss, while in the Non-Metro Country 467 counties experienced population loss. The lower standard of living in the Non-Metro counties could have been a big contributor to their population because an average person wants a better life, a better job, a better paycheck and the Metro County has a much higher probability of offering this.
Racial Distribution
Starting from obvious differences, American Indians or Alaska Natives take a larger percentage in Non-Metro Counties when compared to Metro Counties, while Asians take a larger percentage in Metro Counties when compared to Asians in Non-Metro Counties same case for Blacks and Hispanic.
So what do you think and which would you prefer?…..Give a clap if you like, drop a comment if you want to talk about what you think.
Click HERE for Github link to files used in the Exploratory Data Analysis
