Income Convergence in a Rural, Majority African-American Region

This paper revisits the issue of income convergence by examining the question of whether poorer census block groups have been catching up with wealthier census block groups over the 1980-2000 period. The dataset consists of 161 census block groups in Alabama's west-central Black Belt region. Estimates of a spatial lag model provide support for the conditional convergence hypothesis and explain roughly 60 percent of the variation in income growth. Income growth was positively and significantly correlated with education and employment, and negatively and significantly correlated with majority African-American population.