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:
“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)
“The aim of the laborer should be, not to get his living, to get “a good job,” but to perform well a certain work; and, even in a pecuniary sense, it would be economy for a town to pay its laborers so well that they would not feel that they were working for low ends, as for a livelihood merely, but for scientific, or even moral ends. Do not hire a man who does your work for money, but him who does it for love of it.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Wise men read very sharply all your private history in your look and gait and behavior. The whole economy of nature is bent on expression. The tell-tale body is all tongues. Men are like Geneva watches with crystal faces which expose the whole movement.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)