E C O N O M I C R E P O R T O F T H E P R E S I D E N T

The benefits of this growth have been widely shared as well. Someobservers focus on changes over a decade or two and conclude that inequalityis still rising, but they ignore the recent trends. Between 1993 and 1998,real average household incomes have grown by between 9.9 and 11.7 percentfor every quintile of the income distribution, and the median African Americanhousehold has seen a 15 percent increase in real income. Between 1993and 1998, family incomes in the lowest quintile rose at a 2.7 percent annualrate, slightly faster than the 2.4 percent rate recorded by the top quintile(Chart 1-3). This recent experience contrasts sharply with the performancefrom 1973 to 1993. Similar breadth is evident in the growth of earnings.Although wage inequality continued to widen through 1994, for the past 5years weekly earnings growth has been broad-based.The economy is increasingly providing workers with good employmentopportunities. A recent analysis by the Council of Economic Advisers andthe Department of Labor found that 81 percent of new jobs created from1993 to 1999 are located in industry and occupation categories that paywages above the median. These good jobs have not gone only to the professionalelite: even when professional occupations were excluded from the sample,the study found that 71 percent of new jobs were in categories payingabove the median wage. Nor are workers with college degrees the only onesgaining ground. Among workers with only a high school education, an overwhelmingproportion of job growth was found to occur in those industryand occupation categories in which these workers earn the highest wages.Chapter 1 | 27