Measuring Metropolitan Government Structure and Its Impact on Income Distribution in Metropolitan Areas

This paper provides a preliminary analysis of the importance of metropolitan area government structure on socioeconomic inequality in approximately 70 metropolitan areas in the United States. This study particularly focuses on meaningful classification of metropolitan areas according to their government structure and its possible relationship to measures of inequality, such as the Gini coefficient, the dissimilarity of poor index and the isolation of poor index. Cluster analysis and data from the 1987 Census of Governments are applied in order to classify metropolitan areas according to their government structure and OLS regression analysis is used to test if the created test variable ‘metropolitan area government structure’ has a significant relationship to socioeconomic inequality in metropolitan areas. The results show that government structure should not be ignored when income inequality and dissimilarity of poor are considered. However, due to the small size of the data set and the explorative nature of the classification of the metropolitan areas, these results must be considered preliminary.