A London-based think tank known for its annual prosperity ranking of countries has produced its first-ever assessment of each U.S. state, and it views Connecticut favorably.
Connecticut ranked second, behind Massachusetts, in the Legatum Institute’s United States Prosperity Index. The Northeast region scored well in general.
The recently released index makes use of more than 200 state-level indicators to assess three broad categories for each state: “open economies,” “inclusive societies” and “empowered people.”
Connecticut was strongest in water quality, anti-discrimination laws, life expectancy and low adult death rate, and pre-primary school enrollment levels.
Areas where Connecticut lost the most points included “economic quality” and “social capital.”
Within the economic quality category, the state ranked particularly low in metrics such as state pension funding (measured by the Federal Reserve as of 2016), underemployment and youth unemployment (as measured by the Bureau of Labor Statistics in 2018), and employee engagement (as measured in 2016 by Gallup).
Within the social capital category, Connecticut ranked poorly in several metrics surveyed by BLS, including participation in religious organizations and community groups, and how frequently neighbors reported doing each other a favor.
While it was Legatum’s first ranking of the U.S. states, its researchers also assessed a decade’s worth of data to convey how each state’s prosperity has changed over that time. Connecticut’s second-place ranking was unchanged since 2009, Legatum said.
However, the state’s index score rose slightly over that time, from 64.7 to 66.2. Massachusetts scored 67.6 as of 2019.
As a whole, the U.S. has also seen a rising prosperity score in recent years, but its global ranking has been stuck at 17th place for the last decade.
Legatum, which describes its aim as seeing “all people lifted out of poverty,” said it decided to rank each U.S. state this year in an effort to “understand why the undeniable long-term economic success of the U.S. was not translated fully into social wellbeing.”
