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Industrial restructuring and changing population composition frequently have been treated as competing explanations of growing U.S. income inequality. Using the Gini coefficient, we employ a model of conditional change to explore the relative effects of each on changes of family income distribution between 1970 and 1990, across 784 metropolitan areas and public use microdata areas (PUMAs). Changes in both industrial structure and population characteristics are found to have significant and opposite effects on family income distribution, although there are sharp differences by decade in the dynamics that underlie increasing inequality. Our central conclusion is that it is too soon to eliminate deindustrialization as a significant cause of increased earnings inequality.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. This content downloaded from 128.235.251.160 on SunDisarticulation refers to the juxtaposition of economic sectors with different levels of development and productivity. Disarticulation is hypothesized to have a negative effect on social well-being, net of economic development, because it inhibits the spread effects generally thought to be associated with economic growth. Findings are in accord with this hypothesis, although the relationship is complex. The strongest effects of disarticulation are found among the poorest nations. The concept of disarticulation opens a new and promising avenue of research that may help to resolve contradictory findings of recent research on the political economy of growth. Economic growth in less developed nationsis a means to an end, the end being the improvement of mass welfare. There is a consistent and demonstrable link between economic growth and human welfare, but there is also considerable "slippage" between economic development level and even very basic measures of mass welfare such as infant mortality, longevity, literacy, educational levels, and nutrition. We argue that "disarticulation," a distorted form of economic growth typical of many less developed nations, can account for much of this slippage. BACKGROUNDThe relative lack of correspondence between development level and welfare, particularly among less developed nations, is quite striking. Shin (1975), for example, has shown that only about 20 percent of the variation in infant mortality, perhaps the most sensitive measure of general welfare, can be accounted for by development level. Burma, with a per capita gross national product of less than $200, and Sri Lanka, with less than $400 per capita gross national product, are among the poorest of the world's nations and yet have longevity and infant mortality measures comparable to those of Brazil and Mexico, with six to ten times the per capita gross national product (World Bank 1988). Such misfits between development level * We would like to express our appreciation to the Social and Demographic Research Institute of the University of Massachusetts, for resources and support provided during the course of this research.

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