Category: Economic Development
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Mapping the death of rural Georgia
About a decade ago, still fairly early in my TIGC noodling, I came across an article about declining birth rates in rural areas in some other part of the country. Gee, I wondered. What’s the situation in rural Georgia? As it turned out, that was easy enough to figure out, thanks to an excellent public…
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More on Georgia’s Quality of Life “F” grade from CNBC
Last Thursday I put up a short post about CNBC’s 2025 “Top States for Business” and the fact that Georgia ranked 7th overall and had scored particularly poorly in the network’s Quality of Life category. Georgia ranked 45th out of the 50 states in that category (down from 40th in 2024) and earned an F…
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CNBC puts out latest “Top States for Business” rankings, and guess what …
CNBC, the nation’s leading business network, came out this morning with its 2025 list of “America’s Top States for Business” and awarded top honors, once again, to Geor — Oh, wait. No. Not Georgia. North Carolina. Georgia, whose leaders have been crowing for about a decade now about the No. 1 state for business award…
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Can Brian Kemp make Paul Krugman feel better?
Paul Krugman, the New York Times columnist and Nobel Prize-winning economist, seems even gloomier than usual these days, especially about the state of rural America. He recently went up with a column headlined “The Mystery of White Rural Rage,” which he called “arguably the single greatest threat facing American democracy.” He added: “I have no…
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For the 2023 House Rural Development Council, a quick primer on the sad state of Georgia’s rural economy
The Georgia House Rural Development Council begins its seventh year of deliberations on August 29th in Macon. Created in 2017 by the late House Speaker David Ralston, the group — made up primarily of rural legislators — has met several times each year since then and generated annual reports and legislative recommendations. Despite these efforts,…
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George Berry’s ‘crescent of poverty’ now an economic and political conundrum for Georgia Republicans
In the summer of 1969, a Hawkinsville, Ga., state legislator named John Henry Anderson opined to his hometown newspaper that rural Georgia was subsidizing the City of Atlanta, the state’s capital and largest municipality. That news item somehow caught the attention of Ivan Allen, Jr., then mayor of Atlanta, and he was not pleased. He…