This is the second in a series of posts ranking Georgia counties by various socioeconomic measures. About a week ago I did an initial post ranking the counties based on their population growth over the past three years. Now I’m shifting to economics. In this post, I’ll look at per capita income (PCI), but I’m planning to follow up with a post on other economic metrics, including gross domestic product (GDP).

As regular TIGC readers know, I’ve written a good bit over the past couple of years about Georgia’s PCI performance and have come to see it as a major vector in the widening divide between Metro Atlanta and the rest of the state (or, as I now call the two areas, Atlanna and Notlanna). In brief, Georgia made remarkable gains in its PCI performance over the last 20 years of the 20th century but has lost all that ground since then.

In 1980, Georgians’ average per capita income was 84.5 percent of the national average and we ranked 38th among the 50 states. The state’s performance peaked in 2000 when our average PCI hit 95.1 percent of the national average and we ranked 25th among the states. As of 2023, Georgia’s average PCI was 85.5 percent of the national average and national ranking was 41st. For nearly all that time, the only neighboring state that outperformed us was Florida, but in the past couple of years we’ve fallen behind North Carolina and Tennessee (see chart below).

As I do whenever possible, I work with national datasets in an effort to put the performance of Georgia’s 159 counties into a national perspective, and here there’s one tidbit of good news. When I took my first pass at this data a couple of years ago, Wheeler County finished dead last in the nation: 3,113th out of 3,113 counties. Based on 2022 data — the latest county-level data available from the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) — it’s now up to 3,112th. That puts it ahead of Crowley County, Col., and just behind Issaquena County, Miss.

That’s it. That’s all the good news. Wheeler County is no longer dead last in the nation’s PCI rankings.

Beyond that, Georgia’s woebegone PCI picture hasn’t changed much in the past few years. As of 2022, 100 counties were mired in the bottom national quartile for per capita income, including (except for the coast) all of southeast and east central Georgia (as the map at right shows).

Those 100 counties were home to right at 30 percent of our total population. Only Texas, with nearly triple our population, had more of its residents living in bottom quartile counties, but not by much: 3.46 million Texans to 3.27 million Georgians live in bottom national quartile counties. In contrast, North Carolina, with essentially the same population as Georgia, had less than a third as many people living in bottom national quartile counties.

Following is a sortable, searchable list of all 159 Georgia counties and their state and national PCI rankings.

Stay tuned for more rankings.