State Reports                                                                         

Anything you ever wanted
to know about Illinois

1994 Illinois Statistical Abstract, Bureau of Economic and Business Research, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 428 Commerce West, 1206 S. Sixth St., Champaign 61820; 217/333-2330 (November 1994), 850 pp.; $40 ($50 for diskettes and $75 for book-disk package).

This immense volume is also immensely fascinating — especially for those who enjoy numbers, charts and tables along with a wide assortment of miscellaneous information. For instance, in 1990 the state had slightly more females than males 15 years of age and older; 11.5 percent of the women were divorced or separated, as compared to 8.7 percent of the men, and a quarter of the women had never been married as compared to just under one-third of the men.

Another table reveals that while the state has 4,177 public schools scattered throughout its 102 counties, Pope County has only two schools; the other counties at the far southern edge of the state — Hardin, Pulaski, Alexander and Massac — have three, six, seven and 12 schools respectively. In addition, 11 counties have a single public high school, and 10 contain only one public school district.

A table showing the number of building permits for privately owned residential buildings reveals that the number of such permits doubled for the state as a whole between 1983 and 1993.

The volume is divided into nine sections: metropolitan statistical areas, population and housing, human resources, employment, income, economic activity, economic sectors, public sector, and parks and recreation. It also contains an extensive index and a list of sources. In response to requests from readers of earlier editions of this abstract, quite a number of new data sets were added, including employment by occupation; expenditures on hospitals, physicians and prescriptions; workers compensation; social security benefits; and casino activity.

For researchers who may wish to analyze the data for their own work, the abstract is available on diskettes in spreadsheet files for use on a PC or Macintosh computer.