- January 19, 2017
- Staff Report
This report examines the status of women in Rhode Island’s economy, documenting the economic challenges women continue to face and the ongoing disparities between women and men in terms of wages, earnings and poverty rates. The report was done in partnership with The Women’s Fund of Rhode Island, representing data collected in 2015 and 2016.
Published annually by CCLP, this report presents a collection of critical data designed to look beyond broad-based economic indicators to better understand how the economy is working for all Coloradans across the income spectrum. The report reveals alarming and widening disparities along ethnic, cultural, social and gender lines throughout Colorado.
A persistent question for those who pondered West Virginia’s fate is a simple: why, in a state rich in natural resources, are West Virginians so poor? For more than a century several explanations have been developed by natives and interested “outsiders.” Read the full report.
This report, the ninth annual investigation of The State of Working West Virginia, comes at one of those times when national attention has been drawn to the state in the wake of the 2016 elections. In an even more unusual twist, much national discussion has focused around the conditions of our working class, an example of which is the surprise success of J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Cu lture in Crisis. This analysis is an effort to cut through often overheated rhetoric and look at the available data and at historical trends.
Pundits and historians will wrestle with the meaning of the 2016 elections for years. But from Bernie Sanders supporters on the left to Donald Trump backers on the right, voters sent one common
message: They are frustrated with an economy that has left them behind and elected officials who seem indifferent to their plight. People feel anxious and insecure: With few opportunities to get ahead, ordinary middle-class goals such as sending a kid to college or retiring seem permanently out of reach. What resonated with voters were the candidates’ vows to take action on behalf of
the millions who felt ignored. Here in Vermont people face many of the same problems they did last year, the year before, and the decade before that. A few encouraging things happened in 2015: Incomes rose across all levels, and Vermont’s poverty rate dropped. But these signs come from just one year of U.S. Census data; it’s too soon to know if they represent the beginning of a trend.