Rural America Still Seeking Recovery.

• Position: STATESTATS

Rural America encompasses 72 percent of the country's land and is home to 46 million residents. But the quality of life in rural areas is not keeping pace with that in urban communities. While most urban areas, with highly educated workforces, have recovered from the Great Recession, rural, small-town America has not.

Rural America has been in recession since a period of growth in the 1990s--far longer than the nation as a whole, according to a report on rural poverty released in December by the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire.

Since 2000, the economies of rural regions with less than 50,000 workers have grown by an average of 1.6 percent, compared with 9.1 percent in cities with workforces larger than I million. As jobs have dried up, especially in manufacturing (down 20 percent since 2000) and mining, rural residents have migrated to cities. Since 20 I 0, the rural population has decreased by more than 462,000 people.

Reasons for the job losses include automation of blue collar jobs, giant online retailers undercutting mom-and-pop businesses and an over-reliance on a single industry or business. With the loss of jobs comes a spike in poverty. The portion of rural counties with a poverty rate greater than 20...