American villages richer than cities

For many people 'rural' is synonymous with low incomes and limited economic opportunity, but a recent study has found that most of American villages are actually prosperous and do better than urban areas.

Researchers from the University of Illinois found that one in five rural counties in the United States is prosperous and they do better than cities on all the measures like unemployment rates, poverty rates, high school drop-out rates, and housing conditions.

"Growth and income are the conventional measures of community success," said lead author Andrew Isserman.

"But in talking with farm groups, elected leaders and rural development professionals from across the country, I realised how few were happy. Some worried about growing too much and the others fretted about growing too little," he wrote in the International Regional Science Review.

Isserman added, "When we started our research, people wondered whether we would find any prosperous rural communities at all using those criteria. But more than 300 of the nation's rural counties did better than the nation".