As agriculture continues to cope with COVID-19, speculation looms over the status of rural communities. University of Nebraska researchers have developed the “Thriving Index”, comparing rural areas to similar regions across the upper Midwest.
The director of the UNL Bureau of Business Research, Eric Thompson, speaks with RFD-TV’s Janet Adkison on the index and its findings so far. According to Thompson, “The Thriving Index compares eight rural, Nebraska regions with their peers around the upper Midwest. The goal of the Thriving Index is to benchmark, to compare their growth and economic prosperity with their peers around the region, and specifically, we have 47 measures where we compare things, such as economic growth, economic diversity, education obtainment, demographic renewal, cost of doing business, and quality of life.”
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