Press Releases

News from EPI › The South’s high poverty rates and low economic mobility are the result of racist, anti-worker policies

Press Releases • April 3, 2025

The ongoing influence of slavery and Jim Crow means high poverty rates and low economic mobility in the South, according to a new Economic Policy Institute report.  

These are deliberate outcomes of the Southern economic development model, which is a set of economic policies that can be traced back to the end of slavery when wealthy, powerful Southerners sought to continue to extract the labor of Black men and women with as little compensation as possible. The specific components of this model include low wages for workers, limited regulations on businesses, regressive tax systems, weak social safety nets, and anti-union policies and practices.  

Specifically, the report finds: 

  • Poverty rates across the South (12.4% in 2023) have been consistently higher than other regions (11% in the West and 9.8% in both the Northeast and Midwest). 
  • The South has the highest child poverty rate (18%) of all regions. Black children across the region have the highest poverty rate at 30.1%—almost three times the poverty rate for white children—followed by American Indian and Alaska Native (24.4%) and Hispanic (24%) children. 
  • While just 38.7% of all U.S. children live in Southern states, more than half (55.1%) of all children in households where the head is paid less than $10 an hour live in the South. 
  • Southern states have consistently shown lower levels of intergenerational mobility than other regions. 

The report is the latest in a series, “Rooted in racism and economic exploitation,” that takes a deep dive into the failed Southern economic development model. Previous reports have illustrated the South’s economic underperformance and poor job quality.  

“Efforts to continue exploiting Black workers have led to racist anti-worker policies that continue to maintain high rates of poverty, low economic mobility, and high levels of inequality for workers of all racial and ethnic backgrounds in most Southern states,” said report author Chandra Childers, who is a senior policy and economic analyst for EPI’s Economic Analysis and Research Network. “The Southern economic development model is not serving workers or families across the South and is instead leaving far too many economically insecure and with limited opportunity to ever get ahead.”