As America's exposure to international competitive pressures grows in the years ahead, one can expect that the importance of the international sector to rural America will increase. One of the attractions of rural America to the urban and suburban prospective immigrant is the lower level of housing costs. Indeed, housing costs represent only 19 percent of the income of the typical rural resident compared with 23 percent of the typical urban resident. But it would be a mistake to assume that all of this savings is necessarily translatable into lower overall costs of living. The distances that exist between remote rural areas and more densely populated ones can only be overcome at a cost.
Technology can overcome space but only at a price.
This often translates into lower levels of both nominal and real income in rural areas. Remoteness can lead to concentrations of economic distress. Nearly 23 percent of all non-metropolitan counties had high levels of poverty at the beginning of the l990s compared with 4 percent of metropolitan counties. Rural poverty tends to be less event specific, that is related to death or poor health of the primary earner, and more related to long-established factors such as the limited employent opportunities in the local economy, according to a 1993 study by Calvin Beale. Of course, one of our concerns today in considering the renaissance of rural America is the access to credit as a part of the economic development process.