Anmerkungen:
Nach Informationen von SSRN wurde die ursprüngliche Fassung des Dokuments January 18, 2023 erstellt
Beschreibung:
Measuring community-level human development over time is critical to localizing sustainable development indicators and determining how changes in environments and policies impact heterogeneous populations and create or exacerbate inequality. To date, the majority of longitudinal studies of human development have been done at the national scale, leaving major gaps in our understanding of inequality and how changes at small geographic scales impact the quality of life of individuals. Here, we address this gap by creating and analyzing the first longitudinal dataset of human development indicators at the county level in the United States. We systematically characterize the statistics and dynamics of life expectancy, education, and income over time at the county scale, illustrating local and regional variations in development conditions across the US. We find that while gaps in education and income between counties have not changed much over the last decade, there has been a significant increase in the variance of life expectancy. Gains in life expectancy were primarily concentrated in metropolitan areas while rural counties have lagged, increasing urban-rural disparities over time. Our findings demonstrate that increasing inequalities in life expectancy pose a major challenge for equitable human development in the US and set a baseline for studying the heterogeneous disruptive effects of the COVID-19 pandemic over the long term