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Posts tagged ‘Gross Domestic Product’

Nov 30

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An update on TIGC’s cold case: 36 Georgia counties dead at the scene

A year ago, I stumbled onto a TIGC story that has occupied much of my attention since then. It started when I took what I thought would be a quick look at the latest county-level per capita income (PCI) data from the federal government. As part of that “quick look,” I compared Georgia’s county-level PCI performance to nearly all the other counties in the country and unexpectedly found that we have more counties and more people stuck in the bottom national PCI quartile than any other state.

That discovery pulled me into a year-long examination of barrels full of data, most of it economic, but a lot having to do with education, health, and even politics. I’ve come to think of it as an economics and political cold case, one with myriad clues scattered across geography and time.

Were TIGC a TV crime drama about cold cases, this would be the scene where the investigators stand staring (and still confused) at a huge murder board covered with a mishmash of massive spreadsheets, newspaper clips, and handwritten notes, among other materials. Thick lines would be drawn with Magic Markers to show connections amongst the various dots.

The show’s not over yet, but I can begin to report some of my findings and frame some new questions. For starters, I can offer a body count and damage assessment that I’ve been hesitant to put forward before now.

Tragically, Georgia now has 36 counties that I would declare dead at the scene and dozens more, mostly south of the gnat line, that have been badly wounded and may not make it to a hospital (if there’s still one nearby, that is).

For this post, I’ve compared the performance of Georgia’s 159 counties against roughly 3,000 other counties nationally in four economic categories — per capita income, poverty, gross domestic product per capita, and median household income. I’ve ranked all the counties in each category and then divided each set of rankings into quartiles.

My overarching finding is that Georgia has a highly disproportionate number of counties and shares of population in the bottom national quartile in each of those categories. Here’s a topline summary of what I’ve found so far:

2020 Per Capita Income: One hundred and seven Georgia counties are home to 3.454 million people who fell into the bottom national quartile of 778 counties in this category. That’s more counties and more people than any other state. By comparison, only 39 of Texas’s 254 counties and 3.449 million of its 29.21 million residents landed in the bottom quartile for PCI. Closer to home, Florida has double Georgia’s population but far fewer of its residents — 1.94 million — in this bottom quartile. Similarly, only 29 of North Carolina’s 100 counties and 1.3 million of its 10.45 million residents (only slightly smaller than Georgia’s population) landed in the bottom quartile.

As the map at right shows, most of Georgia’s land mass falls into that bottom quartile. Nationwide, 25.088 million people live in bottom quartile counties. Nearly 14 percent of those are in Georgia.

2020 Poverty: Eighty-nine Georgia counties fell into the bottom national quartile for poverty, based on the Small Area Income and Poverty Estimates (SAIPE) produced by U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey.

Here, too, Georgia had the largest number of counties in this bottom quartile, and one of the largest populations. Georgia has a total of about 2.66 million people living in these high-poverty counties.

That compares to 1.12 million people living in the 25 Florida counties that landed in this bottom national quartile and 1.62 North Carolinians in that state’s 32 bottom quartile counties.

2020 Median Household Income: The picture here is similar to the PCI and poverty maps. In this case, 76 Georgia counties fell into the bottom national quartile, and there is obviously substantial overlap with the first two maps. Here as well, Georgia has more counties in this bottom national quartile than any other state.

2020 Gross Domestic Product Per Capita: This relatively new dataset from the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) offers a county-level look at economic output, and here the picture is a little different. As the map at the left shows, the 81 Georgia counties in the bottom national quartile for this category tend to be more scattered across the state and are less concentrated in South Georgia. This category does, however, have a couple of things in common with the other categories: Georgia once again has more counties in this bottom national quartile than any other state, and the 2.3 million people who live in those counties are among the largest populations stuck in this bottom tier. Texas (with, again, nearly three times the population of Georgia) has 2.9 million people living in the 44 counties that fall into this bottom tier, and retiree-heavy Florida has 3.71 million people living in its 31 low-GDP-per-capita counties.

Finally, Georgia has 36 counties that made the bottom national quartile in all four of these economic categories — and these are the ones I pronounce dead at the scene.

Readers familiar with the geography of poverty and economic deprivation in Georgia will not be surprised at this last map, and, indeed, much of it calls to mind the “crescent of poverty” the late George Berry described for me in an interview a year or so before his death.

Berry had arguably the most storied public administration career in Georgia history. In the 1980s, he served under Governor Joe Frank Harris as commissioner of the Department of Industry, Trade and Tourism (now Economic Development) and was apparently the first individual in that role to emphasize raising per capita income as a key state economic development objective.

(Under Berry’s leadership, the state made remarkable progress in improving PCI through his term and for a decade afterward, only to backslide after the turn of the century.)

In our interview, however, Berry lamented that he “never came up with an answer for what I called ‘crescent of poverty’.”

Neither, obviously, has anybody else. I’ll flesh out their travails in future posts, but it’s difficult at this point to fathom how any of these counties might be resuscitated.

Watch this space for a detailed post-mortem on these 36 counties.

Dec 12

Three-fourths of Georgia’s GDP now produced north of the gnat line

About three months ago I stumbled onto a December 2018 report from the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) that included four years of newly developed county-level gross domestic product (GDP) data.  BEA billed that new set of data as a prototype and announced it would be coming out with an expanded report in December 2019.

That happened today.  This morning, BEA put out 18 years of county-level GDP data for most of the counties in the nation, including all 159 in Georgia, along with an update of its long-standing Total Personal Income and Per Capita Income reports.  So far, in sifting through the data, I haven’t turned up any real blockbuster news, but it does contain a number of interesting nuggets that are worth reporting.

Including:

  • As of 2018, fully three-fourths of the state’s gross domestic product was being generated north of the gnat line. My Trouble in God’s Country 12-county Metro Atlanta region and 41-county North Georgia region accounted for $396.9 billion of the state’s $529.1 billion GDP – or 75.01 percent.  This isn’t a huge surprise, but it is a first, and it represents the high point so far in a steady trend that developed several years ago as the state was clawing its way out of the Great Recession.
  • That divide would probably be even bigger except for the fact that Metro Atlanta got hammered worse than the rest of the state by the Great Recession. I’ve seen that pattern in other economic data – including Internal Tax Revenue data – and this new GDP data simply confirms it.  In 2008, Georgia’s total GDP fell $9.69 billion; of that, $8.26 billion – just over 85 percent of the total loss – came out of Metro Atlanta’s hide.  In 2009, the state’s overall GDP contraction was even bigger – another $17 billion – but the damage was a little more evenly spread; Metro Atlanta’s $11.5 billion loss represented only 67.6 percent of the state’s overall contraction for that year.
  • What’s more, most of the rest of the state initially recovered more quickly from the Great Recession than did Metro Atlanta. In 2010, every region except South Georgia showed a little improvement over 2009 – and South Georgia was basically flat.  Indeed, by 2010 Coastal Georgia and Middle Georgia were back to their 2007 pre-Great Recession levels.  It took Metro Atlanta until 2013 to match its 2007 GDP level.  TIGC’s 41-county North Georgia region took another two years – until 2015 – to get all the way back to pre-recession levels.  South Georgia’s recovery has lagged the other regions.  While its initial hit was relatively modest – down to $34.9 billion in 2008 from $35.7 billion in 2007 – its GDP has bobbed up and down slightly for a full decade, and it didn’t top its 2007 GDP level until 2018.
  • While the Metro Atlanta and North Georgia post-recession recoveries were a little slow getting started, their growth has accelerated over the past five years and easily outpaced the rest of the state. From 2014 through 2018, Metro Atlanta’s GDP grew by 22 percent while North Georgia’s expanded by 15.3 percent.  Coastal Georgia’s GDP grew by a relatively healthy 12.2 percent, but both Middle Georgia and South Georgia were stuck in single-digits – 7.5 percent and 6.1 percent, respectively.  Over that five-year period, the state’s GDP grew by a total of $78.3 billion.  Of that, $68.4 billion – or 87.4 percent – was north of the gnat line.

This table summarizes GDP by TIGC region for selected years and shows both the dollar growth and the percent growth for the most recent five-year period.

Regional GDP Chart

One way of highlighting the widening divide between North and South (and between Metro Atlanta and the rest of the state) is to revisit my comparison from three years ago of all 56 counties in interior South Georgia to Gwinnett County alone (see map).  South Georgia vs Gwinnett County

When I wrote that piece, I found that Gwinnett County, with roughly three-fourths the population of South Georgia, was outperforming South Georgia on every metric I could find – taxes paid, educational achievement, population health, etc.  At the time, the county-level GDP data wasn’t available.

Now that it is, it offers a fascinating addendum to my original comparison – and the data suggest that the Gwinnett-South Georgia gap is getting wider yet.  Going all the way back to 2001, Gwinnett County and South Georgia had very comparable GDPs; South Georgia’s was actually a little bigger — $32.5 billion to $30.8 billion.  As the graph below indicates, South Georgia and Gwinnett County remained at rough parity for about a decade, straight through the Great Recession and its immediate aftermath.

South Ga vs Gwinnett County GDP

But, like Metro Atlanta overall, as Gwinnett County began to recover, it did so at an accelerating pace and has widened its gap with South Georgia.  As of 2018, Gwinnett County’s GDP was nearly $44.2 billion versus just under $36 billion for all of South Georgia.  In the last five years, Gwinnett County’s GDP growth was more than three times that of South Georgia’s.

Another picture to be teased out of the GDP data has to do with county-specific growth rates, and I plan to follow up shortly with a post about that.  But here’s a teaser: Thirty-nine counties had smaller GDPs in 2018 than they did in 2001.  Perhaps predictably, the vast majority were small rural counties, but two were significant regional hub counties: Bibb (Macon) and Floyd (Rome).

Watch this space.

Aug 14

A first look at county-level GDP (with new maps and graphics)

First, a brief announcement: Trouble in God’s Country has a new toy.  I’ve known for a while that I needed some way beyond mere words to communicate all the data I’ve piled up, and recently I began looking around out here on the internet at various mapping programs.  Most of them gave me a headache.

But eventually I found my way to a web-based program called Tableau Public, and then got kickstarted in the use of the program with the help of a couple of smart young Tableau pros.  Apparently old dogs can learn new tricks.

I am, however, very much a Tableau newbie and am still figuring out how to do various things with the software.  In the post that follows, for instance, I would have liked to have been able to embed one of my new live interactive maps or charts, but I haven’t quite been able to break the code on that yet.  Instead, I’ve had to settle for using this static map and including a link, in the body of the post below, that will take you to a little interactive material at Tableau Public’s website.

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With that as preface, herewith some further notes on the widening economic divide between Metro Atlanta and the rest of Georgia:

The U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA), a unit of the Commerce Department, last December published (to virtually no fanfare, as nearly as I can determine) the very first county-level gross domestic product (GDP) figures ever produced.  BEA billed the new data as a prototype, but still, you’d have thought it would have been a bigger deal.

A dive into the Georgia data suggests a couple of things.  First, it basically confirms that nearly two-thirds of the state’s economic muscle is concentrated in TIGC’s 12-county Metro Atlanta region.  The most recent Internal Revenue Service (IRS) data available, for the 2016 tax year, puts Metro Atlanta’s share of the state’s federal taxes at 65.8 percent.  The new BEA data puts Metro Atlanta’s share of 2015 GDP at 63.8 percent – but rising fast.

The real news here is, indeed, the growth rate.  BEA’s new prototype includes data for the years 2012 through 2015.  Over that period, Georgia’s overall GDP expanded from $444.1 billion to $513.1 billion – an increase of just under $69 billion, or 15.53 percent.

But $50 billion of that growth – 72.5 percent – took place in Metro Atlanta.  As a result, Metro Atlanta’s share of GDP expanded 1.4 percentage points in just four years.  In my experience, these kinds of numbers evolve at a more glacial pace – usually hundredths of a point per year rather than tenths.  All four other regions lost a little share of GDP, as this table shows.

Georgia GDP Table

A few other nuggets:

  • Twenty-one counties saw their GDP shrink between 2012 and 2015.

    Georgia County GDP Change Map

    GDP grew in the counties in blue and contracted in the ones in orange; the darker the color, the more extreme the change.

    Tiny Baker County in southwest Georgia led this race to the bottom; its GDP cratered 29.7 percent, dropping from $97.2 million in 2012 to $68.4 million in 2015.  Not far behind was neighboring Calhoun County, where the GDP fell 17.8 percent during the same period – from $113.2 million to $93.1 million.  (You can find an interactive map showing the percentage change in GDP for each county between 2012 and 2015 here: https://tabsoft.co/303CaY0).

  • At the other end of the spectrum, it’s worth noting that four small South Georgia counties led the state in percentage growth over that same period – Telfair County (71.4%), Lanier County (47.9%), Stewart County (47.9%), and Wheeler County (42.4%). While that growth is obviously impressive and encouraging for those counties, their growth combined contributed less $300 million in new GDP to the state’s economy.  By comparison, exurban Dawson County, north of Metro Atlanta, grew by more than double that amount.
  • In December 2016, I published a TIGC post comparing all 56 counties of interior South Georgia to Gwinnett County alone and making the point that Gwinnett County outperformed South Georgia in any metric you could find – economic, educational, public health, etc. The same is true with GDP.  Gwinnett County’s 2015 GDP was $43.5 billion to South Georgia’s $34.3 billion.  In fact, the same can be said of Cobb County, DeKalb County and, of course, Fulton County.  Fulton’s 2015 GDP of $157.4 billion is, in fact, larger than the combined GDP’s of my Middle, South and Coastal Georgia regions – 106 counties altogether.
  • The BEA report breaks the GDP data into three components – “private goods-producing industries,” “private services-providing industries,” and “government and government enterprises.” One mild surprise (at least to me) was how little the government sector contributed to Metro Atlanta’s GDP and how large a part it was of the other regions’ economies.  Despite the fact that the 12-county Metro Atlanta region is home to probably a hundred local governments, Georgia state government, and the regional offices of numerous federal agencies, the government sector made up only eight percent of Metro Atlanta’s $327.3 billion GDP in 2015.  In contrast, it makes up 24.3 percent of the much smaller GDP in both Middle Georgia and Coastal Georgia, no doubt because of the military bases strung across the belly of the state and along the coast, plus the ports at Savannah and Brunswick.  South Georgia’s government share of GDP in 2015 was 20.5 percent; North Georgia’s, 13.2 percent.

This last bullet should tell you why local, state and national politicians used to go a little crazy every time there was new round of military base closings under the old Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) process, and why Congress basically killed it several years ago (try to imagine Middle Georgia without Robins Air Force Base).  It also underscores an observation that came into focus early in my TIGC research: communal investments are critical to building a local economy.  I have yet to find a prosperous Georgia community that doesn’t have some sort of important public institution.