Economy
Traditionally, like much of the South, the Carolinas have been agricultural. However, the predominance of certain crops has influenced the regional economy:
Like other states, until after World War II NC remained primarily a region of small farms and factories heavily dependent on just a few labor-intensive crops, relying on sharecropping and tenancy, especially for black laborers. The Carolinas are distinct for their economic dependence on tobacco as well as on cotton and rice, and for their many small-scale furniture, textile, and tobacco factories.
These small industries gave the Carolinas, in particular NC, a more significant industrial base than most Southern states, but as increased mechanization in the textiles, apparel, and furniture industries combined with the decline of the tobacco industry, many rural and small urban communities suffered. However, during the 1990s, both states began to experience growth in the technological and banking sectors, bringing jobs and population growth. These changes, as with earlier industrialization, were more pronounced in the northern state, and SC has experienced a slower rate of economic growth for several years.
Read more about this topic: The Carolinas
Famous quotes containing the word economy:
“Quidquid luce fuit tenebris agit: but also the other way around. What we experience in dreams, so long as we experience it frequently, is in the end just as much a part of the total economy of our soul as anything we “really” experience: because of it we are richer or poorer, are sensitive to one need more or less, and are eventually guided a little by our dream-habits in broad daylight and even in the most cheerful moments occupying our waking spirit.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“The counting-room maxims liberally expounded are laws of the Universe. The merchant’s economy is a coarse symbol of the soul’s economy. It is, to spend for power, and not for pleasure.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“It enhances our sense of the grand security and serenity of nature to observe the still undisturbed economy and content of the fishes of this century, their happiness a regular fruit of the summer.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)