Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Although there is a significant literature on social service spending to reduce poverty in urban areas, less is known about the rural social safety net. There are reasons to suspect that services to address poverty are disproportionately concentrated in cities,^[1][2] but very little research has explored variation in social service provision across rural areas, despite persistently high rates of poverty in many rural regions. To some degree, this is due to limitations in data: difficulty tracking funds disbursed through block grants; the localized nature of the post-TANF safety net; and a lack of rural-urban identifiers in relevant social service data sources.^[3] As a result, policymakers do not know how funding for the social safety net might systematically vary between rural and urban areas.

This paper uses unique data on social service funding to assess differences in total county expenditures on nonprofit human services per person living in poverty by degree of rurality. Of particular importance are analyses exploring whether disparities in nonprofit human service expenditures may vary types of rural areas. In addition to descriptive analysis, this paper examines how spatial and non-spatial factors are associated with service provision. Data for this project is drawn from the National Center for Charitable Statistics, which includes the total annual expenditures of all nonprofit human services organizations that file an IRS-990 form. This encompasses most nonprofit human services organizations in the country, with the exception of very small organizations and some religious organizations. In my regression model, the dependent variable is total county expenditures on nonprofit human services per person living in poverty in the year 2013 and the independent variables include RUCC codes, dummy variables for region, and dummy variables for political control of the state legislature in the year 2013.

Preliminary findings suggest that nonprofit human services spending is lower in the West, Midwest, and South and as compared to in counties in the Northeast. There is also a negative association between spending and Republican control of the state legislature as compared to states where control is shared between parties. This analysis suggests that whether a county is rural and how rural a county is matters for human services spending, even after controlling for region and state politics. In particular, rural counties with urban areas of <20,000 people have lower levels of spending than large metropolitan counties, and this relationship gets stronger as those counties get more rural. For rural counties with urban areas of >20,000 people, this association was less clear.