Source page: McKinsey & Company
Commentary
Rural America in focus
Economic Development | Manufacturing | Agriculture
September 25, 2025 – Rural America is home to 46 million people, yet it remains under-researched. A McKinsey Institute for Economic Mobility study, led by Senior Partner Shelley Stewart III and coauthors, explored rural America by segmenting it into six distinct archetypes, each demonstrating varying economic drivers and levels of resident well-being. For example, agriculture accounts for more than 20.0 percent of GDP in the agricultural powerhouses, and those regions have a 59.8 percent labor force participation rate. Resource-rich regions generate twice the GDP per capita compared with agricultural powerhouses, but these areas saw a 6 percent GDP decline between 2020 and 2022. To catalyze economic development, the report suggests focusing on businesses, workers, and basic needs by establishing partnerships to support entrepreneurs, investing in anchor institutions such as universities, and prioritizing postsecondary preparedness and connectivity for K–12 students. Click through the interactive to see more.
Interactive
To read the article, see “Small towns, massive opportunity: Unlocking rural America’s potential,” August 4, 2025.
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Visual form
County map with selectable archetype views.
Layout / body structure
The visual works like a dashboard-style centered on a U.S. county map with Alaska and Hawaii inset below. Reader starts with the national all-archetypes view and then switches category views one at a time to see how each rural archetype is distributed across counties.
What is being compared
It compares rural U.S. counties by archetype, separating them into groups such as agricultural powerhouses, manufacturing workshops, middle America, and resource-rich regions. The comparison is geographic rather than time-based, showing where each archetype is concentrated across the country.
Measurement system
The map uses categorical color coding rather than a numeric axis. Each county is assigned to one archetype, and the labels in the identify the category being shown in the current view.
Visible structure inside the graphic
The core structure is a county-by-county U.S. map with each county shaded by category. In the all-archetypes view, multiple colors appear across the national map at once. In an individual view such as agricultural powerhouses, one archetype is highlighted in dark blue while nonselected counties fall back to white, which makes the geographic footprint of that group stand out. Alaska and Hawaii are separated into inset boxes so their county patterns can still be read.
Main takeaway from the visual
The visual shows that rural America is not one uniform geography. Instead, different county clusters form distinct archetypes, and those archetypes occupy very different parts of the country.
Key standout values or extremes
The strongest concentration in the agricultural-powerhouses view runs through the central U.S. farm belt, while the all-archetypes view shows a much more mixed national patchwork. The source text also anchors the stakes with 46 million rural residents and notes that agriculture exceeds 20.0 percent of GDP in agricultural powerhouses.
Controls / sequence, when applicable
The reader can toggle between archetype views, moving from the all-categories map to single-category maps such as agricultural powerhouses. That interaction changes which counties stay highlighted and lets the reader compare each archetype’s footprint across the same base map.
Companion media, when applicable
There is no separate companion audio or video; the chart is the full visual on this page.