Intro: Context and Background

In recent years, West Virginia has suffered an economic decline due to a convergence of factors, including the financial crisis, loss of manufacturing jobs, and more recently the downturn of the coal industry. Although the US economy has recovered and grown over the past years, West Virginia has struggled to match those trends, as its economy remained stagnant until 2016, and only recently started to grow again. 

In response, leaders from West Virginia University (WVU), the State of West Virginia, and Marshall University came together to identify solutions that can revive the fortunes of the State. In addition to ongoing efforts from local and regional actors across the State to support economic recovery and growth, several key players agreed to embark on West Virginia Forward to define a path for economic development across the State. This report summarizes key points from this work, building on existing efforts in the State and defining ways for the State government, WVU, and Marshall to achieve three main objectives:

1. Identify potential industrial sectors where West Virginia can grow and diversify its economy 
   
2. Define actions that can improve the State’s economic environment across infrastructure, human capital, innovation and business development, and the ease of doing business 
   
3. Create a clear roadmap for implementation that will enable effective execution of the defined initiatives by different actors across the State
   

In order to avoid redundancy and build upon existing findings and knowledge, West Virginia Forward focused on contributing additional insights to existing thinking. As such, topics that were covered in previous reports such as Workforce WV’s “Economic Review” and “Workforce Development System Report”, the “West Virginia Economic Outlook” report published by the Bureau of Business and Economic Research at West Virginia University and the STEM jobs report^[19] by TechConnect were reviewed but were not re-examined in depth here.