Rural poverty, tourism and spatial heterogeneity

The intent of this research is to explore changes in US rural poverty rates from 1990 to 2000. Using Geographically Weighted Regression (GWR) I focus on spatial variations in the role of tourism and recreation in changing poverty rates. Results suggest that tourism and recreation as I have measured it play a small role in explaining changes in poverty rates and there is limited spatial variation. This result challenges the notion that the promotion of tourism and recreation as a rural economic development strategy results in low paying inferior job opportunities.