After the US Cen­sus Bureau released the poverty fig­ures last week, we are see sto­ries for indi­vid­ual states that fur­ther break down the numbers.

In an area of the US that has very lit­tle poverty, the state of Rhode Island has seen the biggest increase in the past year. The tiny state now has more poverty than any other in the New Eng­land region. The increase is blamed on the global reces­sion and the cuts in the num­ber of jobs.

From the Prov­i­dence Jour­nal, writer Paul Edward Parker has this look at the cen­sus numbers.

From 2007 to 2008, Rhode Island dis­placed Mass­a­chu­setts as the New Eng­land state with the high­est poverty rate. The state also leap-frogged past Maine and Ver­mont in the process, going from fourth high­est to high­est in the six-state region.

Even so, Rhode Island didn’t fare too badly com­pared to the national aver­age because the New Eng­land had some of the low­est poverty rates in the coun­try. New Hamp­shire had the low­est rate nation­ally, at 7.0 percent.

Con­necti­cut was third, with 8.1 per­cent, and Ver­mont sixth, with 9.0 per­cent. Rhode Island’s 12.7 per­cent rate tied it with Kansas for 26th low­est in the nation, and the state had less poverty than the coun­try as a whole, which mea­sured 13.2 percent.

“So many peo­ple have lost their jobs,” said Linda Katz, pol­icy direc­tor, the Poverty Insti­tute at the Rhode Island Col­lege School of Social Work. ” The increase in poverty is related to the fact that peo­ple have lost their jobs and their source of income.”

Katz noted that Rhode Island’s unem­ploy­ment rate jumped more than two per­cent­age points from July 2007 to July 2008. Revised num­bers from the fed­eral Bureau of Labor Sta­tis­tics show the rate increased dur­ing that period from 5.2 per­cent to 7.9 percent.

“Our con­cern, of course, is going for­ward,” she said. “We’re very con­cerned about what the data in 2009 is going to show because we’ve fallen much deeper into eco­nomic hardship.”

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