(Continued from page 12)

teenage birth rates and the percentage of children who live in single-parent families. The study measured 16 different factors.
• Child advocates in the four states were surprised by some of the results.
• Nebraska's ranking on economic health "definitely was a bit of a shock, just knowing how devastating the effects of the recession have been here," said Jill Westfall, a spokeswoman for Voices for Children in Nebraska. "We still have nearly one in five kids growing up in poverty."
• In Iowa, "our poverty rate is creeping upwards," said Michael Crawford, director of Iowa Kids Count. "Unfortunately, we're going in the wrong direction ... but our numbers are still lower than the national average."
• In measuring economic health, the study reviewed information about the percentage of children in each state whose families were below the poverty line of about

$22,000 in annual income in 2010, the number of unemployed parents and teens who were not in school, and the percentage of children whose families pay more than 30 percent of their income on housing.
• For the four states, the findings bucked a national trend. The foundation said its report showed a continued decline in the economic well-being of children since 2005, while documenting improvements in children's health and school results.
• Officials in the four states said they did not suffer the worst effects of the national recession, helped by robust prices for farm crops and livestock and, in North Dakota's case, a boom in oil production.
• Those states have had relatively stable housing markets and have avoided the collapse in home values suffered in some states during the Great Recession, said Steve Cochrane, managing director of Moody's Analytics, a national economic forecasting firm.
• The upper Midwest "had very little of the housing cycle like much of the rest of the country, where you had a boom and a bust," Cochrane said. "And commodity prices have been very, very strong ... particularly for grain crops."
• The study's results are reflected in the June jobless rates of the four states. North Dakota had the nation's lowest June unemployment rate at 2.9 percent, followed by Nebraska (3.8 percent) and South Dakota (4.3 percent), according to the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics. Iowa was seventh, at 5.2 percent. The national June jobless rate was 8.2 percent.
• North Dakota's economic growth has been boosted by an energy boom. The state's number of oil wells has doubled and its production has increased fivefold since 2007. At almost 640,000 barrels a day, North Dakota now ranks only behind

(Continued on page 14)