Disproportionate agglomeration and scaling in regional socioeconomic analyses: Alabama counties as a case study

Abstract

The importance of population-based scaling of the socioeconomic characteristics of cities has been regularly demonstrated over the past decade. Disproportionate population-based agglomeration of socioeconomic properties relative to one another are, therefore, common characteristics of cities. In other words, socioeconomic characteristic increase or decrease non-linearly and disproportionately as the population of cities increase or decrease. Whether this is also the case in regions with urban and rural populations has not yet been examined. This contribution uses small Alabama counties (fewer than 120,000 residents) in a case study to examine the orderliness of eleven different demographic, socioeconomic and entrepreneurial characteristics: (i) the numbers of residents, enterprises, employees, highly educated people, poor people and households, and, (ii) the magnitudes of enterprise richness, gross domestic products, payrolls, total incomes and a community poverty index. Pair-wise comparisons by means of power law analyses demonstrated extraordinary orderliness in the demographic-socioeconomic-entrepreneurial domains. Disproportionate agglomerations enabled identification of super-linear, sub-linear or linear scaling impacts. Non-linear scaling in the demographic-socioeconomic-entrepreneurial nexus of regions with urban and rural populations should be considered in regional studies.