The Economic Policy Institute

The Economic Policy Institute’s mission is to inform and empower individuals to seek solutions that ensure broadly shared prosperity and opportunity.
About EPI. The Economic Policy Institute (EPI) is a nonprofit, nonpartisan think tank created in 1986 to include the needs of low- and middle-income workers in economic policy discussions. EPI believes every working person deserves a good job with fair pay, affordable health care, and retirement security. To achieve this goal, EPI conducts research and analysis on the economic status of working America. EPI proposes public policies that protect and improve the economic conditions of low- and middle-income workers and assesses policies with respect to how they affect those workers.

 EPI was the first—and remains the premier—think tank to focus on the economic condition of low- and middle-income Americans and their families. Its encyclopedic State of Working America, published 12 times since 1988, and now for the first time in complete electronic form as well, is stocked in university libraries around the world. In the 1990s EPI researchers were the first to illustrate the decoupling of productivity and pay in the U.S. economy, a trend now widely recognized as a key element of growing economic inequality. EPI changed the nature of public debates over international trade agreements by underscoring their effects on workers and the importance of putting enforceable labor standards in trade agreements. EPI has focused, and continues to focus unrelentingly and unfailingly, on the dynamics of wage stagnation for most workers and rising inequality and on what can be done to halt and reverse these trends.