The income gap between West Virginia’s richest and poorest residents has widened dramatically over the past few decades, according to a study by the Economic Policy Institute and the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
West Virginia had the seventh largest increase in income inequality in the nation between the late 1970s and the mid-2000s, according to the study by the nonprofit and nonpartisan research organization. It found that in the mid-2000s, the richest 20 percent of families had an income $134,464 per year. That’s 8.4 times greater than the poorest 20 percent, whose average yearly income was $15,917. In the late 1970s, the ratio was 4.9. Read
