The Christian Science Monitor ponders "Is Shopping at Wal-Mart Immoral?" There's lots of teeth-gnashing about ethics (based on notions of "distribution" not personal freedom, of course), but it also includes this claim:

"This "race to the bottom" in labor costs also seems to rub off on a surrounding area, according to research from economists Stephan Goetz and Hema Swaminathan at the Northeast Regional Center for Rural Development at Penn State University. While the national poverty rate dropped 2.4% between 1990 and 2000, the rate fell by just 0.2% on average in counties that added a Wal-Mart. One theory: Although Wal-Mart creates jobs, the company also eliminates jobs by putting others out of business.

"We didn't expect Wal-Mart would be able to affect poverty on a countywide basis, but lo and behold it did," says Goetz."

I found the underlying paper here; I haven't yet given it a careful read but a quick skimming already finds a problem with the passage in CSM. The sentence reporting "the national poverty rate dropped 2.4% between 1990 and 2000, the rate fell by just 0.2% on average in counties that added a Wal-Mart" is incorrect. The study finds that the marginal effect of an additional Wal-Mart is 0.2 percentage points not the 2.2 (=2.4-0.2) percentage points impied in the quoted sentence. As Stephan Goetz summarizes on his website:

"The statistical model developed for this study suggests that the counties that added a Wal-Mart store during the decade saw the poverty rate decline by a smaller amount than did counties not adding a store. The net predicted effect of a new store was relatively small, amounting to a 0.2 percentage point higher poverty rate for one new store, 0.4 percentage points for two new stores, and so forth compared to the case where no new store was added. Even so, the effect was statistically significant."

The 0.2 percentage point effect is a more plausible magnitude, but I'm still skeptical that Wal-Mart caused a smaller decrease in poverty between 1990 and 2000. Instead I suspect that it's locations just happen to be correlated with places where poverty declined more slowly in the 1990s. (Note that the study does attempt to control for other factors that might be related to poverty; how well it does so might be another matter.)

If you're not getting enough Wal-Mart here at DOL try AlwaysLowPrices.

UPDATE: Art Carden has a Wal-Mart article on the Mises blog.

ANOTHER UPDATE: I've written a letter to the editor of CSM about the incorrect poverty statistics. Based on the anti-Wal-Mart letters that CSM has already printed (link here, scroll down), I'm not optimistic about having my letter published.