Evidence on the spatial organization of the economy: Labor patterns in the Mississippi valley

Stafford H. A. (1968) Evidence on the spatial organization of the economy: Labor patterns in the Mississippi valley, Reg. Studies 2, 115–130. The primary purpose of this study is to evaluate the relative applicability of the concepts of the uniform region versus the nodal region in the organization of economic space. The data utilized are occupational statistics for 105 counties of the middle Mississippi Valley of the central United States. The results indicate that, except for the farmers, the various occupational types show very similar spatial distributions. However, when the occupational profiles are compared it is found that there are great differences between areas. Although the regional groupings produced are very complex, there is evidence that the ruralurban spatial system better describes the observed patterns than do any notions of contiguous, uniform economic regionalization.