Posts tagged ‘U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis’

Feb 13

TIGC’s first bowl of 2023 alphabet soup: PCI, JTC, DOR & GOP

Lately I’ve been working on about a half-dozen pieces that have to do in one way or another with the “cold case” I began focusing on about a year ago. Today I’ll hit the highlights (or lowlights) of some of those pieces and tease the follow-ups to come.

First, the 2021 PCI numbers are out and Georgia is still at the bottom of the heap. It was a little over a year ago that I took a deep dive into 2020 per capita income data produced by the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) and discovered that Georgia had more counties and more people in the bottom national quartile for PCI than any other state. The 2021 data is no better. One-hundred-and-five of the 778 counties in the bottom national quartile are Georgia counties, and those counties are home to 3.2 million people — right at 30 percent of the state’s population. Only Texas, with nearly triple Georgia’s population, has more residents — 3.4 million — in that bottom quartile. North Carolina, with roughly the same population as Georgia and comparable economic and education metrics, has less than a third as many of its citizens in that bottom quartile. Poor ol’ hapless Wheeler County, Ga., still ranks 3,113th out of 3,113 U.S. counties for the second year in a row.

Second, it’s increasingly difficult to ignore the juxtaposition between the state’s PCI performance and its shift to Republican governance. As I noted in one piece on this issue, Georgia made remarkable progress in raising the state’s per capita income in the final years of the 20th century and then surrendered all that progress in the opening years of the 21st century. That rise-and-fall pattern coincided perfectly with the final years of Democratic leadership at the Gold Dome and the opening years of Republican leadership. I said in my early pieces on this subject that I was reluctant to blame Republicans for the collapse in PCI performance, but the question seems a fair one. Sonny Perdue, who defeated incumbent Democratic Governor Roy Barnes in 2002 and became Georgia’s first Republican governor in more than a century, oversaw the biggest decline in PCI performance in at least the last half-century. Under his leadership, Georgia’s per capita income fell from 94.6 percent of the national average to 85.6 percent and we dropped in rank from 26th place to 41st. To be fair, Perdue presided over one of the most challenging economies in the state’s history; he took office in the wake of 9/11 and governed through the Great Recession. But he was hardly alone; 49 other governors faced the same challenges. The question is, why did Georgia fare so much worse during this period than nearly all other states? In the 20 years from the beginning of Democrat Joe Frank Harris’s first term in 1983 and the end of Barnes’s four-year tenure, only one state — Vermont — gained more ground; in the 20 years from the beginning of Perdue’s tenure through the first three years of Governor Brian Kemp’s first term, only one state — Delaware — lost more ground.

Third, one possible answer to that question that deserves more attention is whether Georgia is paying an economic development price for cuts to education. Governor Perdue and his successor Nathan Deal chopped billions of dollars out of the state’s education budget. In what may have been a prescient Georgia Trend column headlined “Perdue’s sad legacy,” the late Tom Crawford wrote this in March 2009: “Georgia is competing against other states to lure sophisticated, high-tech businesses at the same time that we’re spending $2 billion less to train and educate the prospective work force. This doesn’t make any sense at all.” At the same time Crawford wrote that column, rural Georgia enrollment in University System of Georgia institutions was beginning a significant downhill slide. In 2013, the Fiscal Research Center at Georgia State University produced a report titled “Population, Employment, and Income Trends for Georgia and Atlanta.” Authored by Professor David Sjoquist, that report noted several softening economic trends and listed educational performance as one of the possible reasons why. “It is possible that the relative low performance of the K-12 education system is slowing growth,” Sjoquist’s report said. “The skill level required for most jobs has increased, which means an educated labor force has become increasingly important for attracting jobs. On lots of dimensions, Georgia’s K-12 education system performs well below the national average.” That report went on to note that Georgia ranked “19th in terms of the percentage of the population with at least a college degree,” but neglected to mention that those college graduates were concentrated overwhelmingly in the Atlanta area.

Fourth (and this is being really, really, really charitable), Georgia’s Job Tax Credit ain’t working as originally planned. This program was created in the early 1990s and basically codified raising per capita income, reducing poverty, and creating jobs as important economic development objectives. Initially, the JTC program focused solely on the state’s 40 poorest counties — as determined by a formula that factored in county-level PCI, poverty rates, and unemployment rates. Over time, the program has been expanded in several ways. It now includes all 159 counties, no matter how prosperous, and the counties have been placed in one of four tiers, depending on how they score on the PCI/Poverty/Unemployment formula. Tax credit amounts have been increased and the number of new jobs a business has to create to qualify for the credits has been reduced. When the program was launched in 1991, a company had to create a minimum of 10 jobs in one of the state’s Bottom-40 counties to qualify for a $1,000 per job credit; now, the minimum requirement for those Bottom-40 is down to two jobs and each one entitles the job creator to a $3,500 tax credit. But even that isn’t working — at least not for Georgia’s poorest counties. According to a report by the Georgia Department of Revenue (DOR), $56.7 million in tax credits were claimed in 2021 for the creation of 20,417 jobs. My analysis of that report found that only 1,734 of those jobs were created in that year’s Bottom 40 counties, and 20 of those counties didn’t get a single new JTC-supported job. In contrast, Fulton County alone picked up 5,974 new JTC-supported jobs.

Fifth and last, stir all this data together in a big pot and it pretty much boils over with irony. Perhaps the biggest of these is political. According to the above-mentioned DOR report, 79 of Georgia’s 159 counties didn’t get a single new JTC-supported job in 2021; in the 2022 governor’s race, 71 of those counties went for incumbent Republican Governor Brian Kemp. This includes three of the four counties — Brantley, Glascock and Pierce — that gave 90 percent of their vote to Kemp; the fourth of Kemp’s 90-percent counties — Banks — snagged 22 such jobs. Fully 60 percent of the 2021 jobs created under the JTC program went to Democratic counties.

Watch this space. There’s more to come on all these topics.

Copyright Trouble in God’s Country 2023

Apr 28

1 Comment

Chapter III in my ongoing post-mortem of Georgia’s PCI performance from 1980-2020

Late last year, I posted two pieces about Georgia’s per capita income (PCI) performance. I hadn’t intended to do that. My original objective had been to take a quick look at a new release of 2020 PCI data from the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA), knock out a quick one-off, and move on.

But one thing I always try to do, especially when I’m working with a national dataset, is put Georgia’s numbers into a national context. When I did that with this latest batch of BEA data, I was surprised to find that Georgia had more people and counties at the bottom of the national PCI pile than any other state in the nation.

The straight blue line at the 100% mark represents the national average for per capita income (PCI). The orange line represents Georgia’s performance relative to that national average, based on data from the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA).

That became the lede of the first piece. It also got my curiosity up, and I started backtracking through 50 years of BEA data to see if I could figure out what was happening. That resulted in the discovery of what I described, in the second piece, as Georgia’s 40-year PCI roller-coaster ride. The state made massive, almost unmatched gains during the final 20 years of the last century, then surrendered all those gains during the early part of this century.

As a long-ago political journalist (and now an aging political junkie), I couldn’t help but notice how the state’s PCI roller-coaster ride matched up against the state’s political timescale. All the gains took place under Democratic governors; all the losses followed under Republicans. I deliberately stopped short of ascribing credit or blame (and still do), but the pattern was (and still is) difficult to ignore.

The political question aside, I began to think the rise and fall of Georgia’s PCI trendlines is a significant part of the overall TIGC story — maybe a key driver in fueling the ongoing divide between urban and rural Georgia and, especially, Metro Atlanta and the rest of the state. I’ve since come to view the story as something of an economics and maybe political cold case, and I’ve spent an embarrassing amount of time researching various angles over the past few months (which is one reason I haven’t posted much lately).

Among other things, I began to pick the brains of various contacts who moved in political and economic development circles during that 40-year span; found and plowed through a couple of dozen relevant reports and articles, and took several deep dives into other pots of economic data for the 40-year period.

The result of that research is a couple of binders full of material and several storylines that are tough to bring together in a single piece and would be too long for a blog post even if I did. As a result, I’ve decided to dribble it out in a series of brain dumps that should, if nothing else, help me clear my head so that I can move on to other subjects (several of which have been stacking up over the past couple of months).

Brain Dump No. 1 follows.

———-

One of the first things I learned in my research is that the 40-year PCI roller-coaster ride I reported on in December wasn’t exactly breaking news.

It turns out that the Fiscal Research Center (FRC) at Georgia State University had been monitoring the same metrics (and others) for a while. In September 2013, the FRC published a 26-page report by Professor David L. Sjoquist that, among other findings, found essentially the same roller-coaster pattern I did late last year.

(I say “essentially” because there appear to be some very minor differences in some of the data Professor Sjoquist and his team found in 2013 versus what I found late last year. I suspect these differences owe to periodic revisions and refinements BEA (which was also Sjoquist’s source) makes to its data.)

The Sjoquist report looked at population, employment, and income trends and noted, broadly, that the state’s growth rates appeared to be slowing. It also mused about various potential causes for these trends, including poor public schools, the loss of jobs to other countries, bad traffic, even a “leadership vacuum” in the business community (which had indeed been undergoing a transition from an era dominated by homegrown barons like Robert Woodruff, Mills B. Lane and Tom Cousins to a new generation of imported CEOs who headed a wave of new Fortune 500 companies putting down stakes in Metro Atlanta).

The closest it came to pondering the efforts of the state’s gubernatorial administrations was this bullet point in a section of the report focused on employment trends:

“Georgia may be pursuing the wrong economic development strategy, which currently seems to be focused on providing tax incentives. Perhaps a strategy that focused more on providing a better labor force, infrastructure, and amenities would result in greater net job growth.”

Nor did the FRC take note of the fact that the wind had gone out of the state’s economic sails only after the GOP took over the state capitol. And, again, that may indeed have been coincidental. Georgia’s economy was red hot through much of the 1980s and ‘90s, and nothing lasts forever. At least one important figure did seem to think gubernatorial focus was relevant to the state’s economic focus, however.

George Berry, who served as commissioner of the Department of Industry, Trade & Tourism (now Economic Development) under Governor Joe Frank Harris during the 1980s, put a bright spotlight on PCI in a guest column for Georgia Trend magazine in January 2011. Governor Sonny Perdue, the state’s first GOP governor in a century, was leaving office and his successor, Republican Nathan Deal, was about to begin his first term.

In that piece, Berry wrote:

“As Gov. Nathan Deal begins his administration, he would do well to consider the over-arching accomplishment that defines Georgia’s advancement over the last half century: the progress we have made toward economic parity with the rest of the nation.

“That progress can be best defined by comparing the per capita income of Georgians to that of citizens of other states.

“For decades Georgians lagged in this elemental measure. As late as the onset of World War II, we were barely at 60 percent of the national average per capita income. This is not an abstract but rather an intensely personal statistic. It measures how much education one can afford, how much healthcare one receives, whether one can take his children to a dentist and even how many culturally enriching experiences one can have.”

Berry concluded his column with this: “If our new governor can improve this vital statistic, he will be assured of a successful administration. Because it is a measure easily calculated, everyone can keep score. It is in all of our best interests that Gov. Deal be the one to celebrate that day when Georgia finally achieves 100 percent of the national average per capita income.”

(I wrote about Berry in this post nearly a year ago, and I’ll have more to say about his focus on PCI in another of these brain dumps.)

As things worked out, Georgia’s PCI performance under Deal was basically flat. It gained a little ground in 2011, suffered a two-point drop in 2012, and then made slow but steady progress until the end of Deal’s second term in 2018. At that point, Georgia’s average PCI stood at 86.7 percent of the national average; in Governor Brian Kemp’s first two years in office, that number ticked up ever-so-slightly to 87.0 percent – just under the 87.1 percent figure the state posted at the end of Joe Frank Harris’s first year in office.

Thus endeth Brain Dump No. 1.

Watch this space.

Dec 9

3 Comments

Georgia’s 40-year PCI rollercoaster ride

In the final 20 years of the last century, Georgia made remarkable economic progress on at least one front: the state’s per capita income (PCI) gained more than 10 percentage points against the national average and came within five points of that important benchmark. In the process, the state’s PCI rank among the 50 states and the District of Columbia climbed from a low of 41st to a high of 25th.

In the first two decades of this century, however, Georgia has surrendered nearly all those gains and fallen back into the nation’s bottom ranks for per capita income. Its 2020 rank was 37th. Only three states gained more ground against the national PCI average than Georgia between 1980 and 2000, and only four lost more ground between 2000 and 2020.

In the process, hundreds of thousands of Georgians were first lifted out of the bottom national quartile for per capita income but have since fallen back into it. As TIGC reported in its last post, Georgia finished 2020 with more of its citizens living in bottom-quartile PCI counties than any other state in the union, including states like Texas and Florida with significantly larger populations.

While that last post focused exclusively on new 2020 data released in November by the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA), this one takes a deeper look at a half-century’s worth of PCI data with an eye toward trying to answer a question we posed in the last post: Why is such a large portion of Georgians apparently stuck at the bottom of the nation’s income ladder?

The answer to that question remains elusive, but the lookback at the last 50 years reveals that Georgia has been on a PCI rollercoaster that is all but unique among the 50 states and D.C. Through the 1970s, Georgia’s PCI ranking was basically flat at between 38th and 40th place among the 50 states and D.C. But from 1983 through the end of the century, the state’s ranking climbed steadily, if unevenly, to a peak of 25th place in 1999 before plateauing at 26th place for the next three years. Since then, Georgia has dropped precipitously in the national PCI rankings. It bottomed out at 40th and 41st from 2008 through 2015 before rebounding to 37th by the end of 2020.

These are among the major findings and observations from an ongoing TIGC review of 50 years of personal income data produced by the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA).

And while identifying the exact causes of the state’s rollercoaster ride will require further research, it’s difficult to ignore the overlap between the rise and fall of the state’s PCI fortunes with the transition in the state’s political leadership: all the gains occurred under Democratic governors and all the losses followed under Republicans.

The most dramatic progress came under Governor Joe Frank Harris, who served from 1983 through 1990. During that period, Georgia moved up in the PCI rankings from 37th to 30th. The progress continued under Governor Zell Miller, who succeeded Harris and served the next eight years. After plateauing at 30th or 31st for three years, the state resumed its climb and reached 26th place by the time Miller left office at the end of 1998. Under Governor Roy Barnes, the state’s last Democratic governor, the state’s PCI ranking peaked at 25th in 1999 and then plateaued at 26th for the final three years of his one term in office.

Barnes lost his 2002 reelection bid to Sonny Perdue, who took office in January 2003 as the state’s first Republican governor in modern times and went on to handily win reelection in 2006. By the time he left office in 2010, Georgia’s national PCI ranking had plunged 15 spots to 41st, tying an all-time low for the last half-century.

Under Nathan Deal, Perdue’s successor and the state’s second GOP governor in more than a century, the state’s national PCI ranking floated along at 41st and 40th for the first five years of Deal’s two terms before rebounding slightly to 38th by the time he left office. Now two years into the term of the state’s third Republican leader in modern times, Governor Brian Kemp, the state stands 37th in the nation’s PCI ranking — the same ranking it had when Governor Harris took office.

Whether the various governors deserved all the credit or blame for the ups and downs in the PCI rankings is a matter for debate, but it seems a fair question. Were there changes in economic development, education or other policies and practices that drove the rankings and, more importantly, the personal fortunes of Georgians impacted by the 40-year seesaw effect? Or was it all just a huge coincidence?

As part of this analysis, I have used the BEA data to rank all the counties in the country by per capita income, sort them into national quartiles, and then pull the 159 Georgia counties out of the national list. As a result, I can determine how many Georgia counties — and Georgians — lived in each quartile in any given year. So far, I’ve done this part of the analysis for each year preceding a gubernatorial transition.

At the end of 1982, just before Harris took office, some 21.8 percent of the state’s 5.65 million residents — about 1.23 million people — lived in 91 counties in the bottom quartile of the nation’s PCI rankings. By the time Barnes left office in 20 years later, those numbers were down dramatically: less than 10 percent of the state’s 8.51 million citizens — fewer than 830,000 people — lived in 53 counties in that bottom national quartile.

When Perdue left office in 2010, the percentage of Georgians living in bottom quartile counties had exploded to more than 30.3 percent of the state’s estimated population of 9.7 million people — some 2.9 million people in 104 counties. At the end of 2020, the picture was no better: more than 3.05 million Georgians were living in 104 bottom quartile counties — the most of any state in the country, as TIGC reported in its last post.

To be clear, Georgia’s PCI has continued to rise throughout this period, but for the past 18 years it has lost ground against the national average. When Barnes left office at the end of 2002, the state’s average PCI of $30,133 was 94.6 percent of the national average of $31,859. When Perdue left office eight years later, the state’s average PCI stood at $34,830, but that was only 85.6 percent of the national average for 2002: $40,690.

The two graphs below should help tell this story. The first one illustrates the rise and fall of Georgia’s per capita income as a percentage of the national average. The straight blue line across the upper part of the graph represents the national average across the 40-year timescale. The orange line below it illustrates the rise and fall of Georgia’s per capita income as a percentage of that national average.

This second graph shows how Georgia’s actual per capita income tracks against the national average over the past 40 years. The gap narrowed, sometimes unevenly, through the 1980s and ’90s before beginning to widen at the turn of the century.

This is the second of at least three posts I’m developing based on the BEA’s latest economic data. In the next one, I’ll return to my usual focus on the state’s urban-rural divide, including trends in the different regions of the state.

(c) Copyright Trouble in God’s Country 2021

Dec 9

1 Comment

New county-level GDP data suggests rural Georgia has, for a change, improved relative to Metro Atlanta

For the first time in years, rural Georgia in 2019 actually gained a little ground on Metro Atlanta in terms of economic output, according to new data released Thursday by the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA).

The new county-level gross domestic product (GDP) data shows that, from 2018 to 2019, TIGC’s 56 South Georgia counties and 43 Middle Georgia counties grew their GDPs by 3.8 percent and 2.3 percent, respectively, while the 12-county Metro Atlanta region and North Georgia’s 41 counties grew by only 1.5 percent and .8 percent, respectively.

As TIGC reported a year ago, fully three-fourths of Georgia’s GDP is produced in Metro Atlanta and North Georgia, but the 106 mostly rural counties from Macon south whittled away slightly at that difference in 2019. In 2018, 75.4 percent of the state’s $538.8 billion economy was generated in Metro Atlanta and North Georgia. In 2019, the Metro Atlanta-North Georgia share of the 2019 $547.8 billion GDP was down two-tenths of a point, to 75.2 percent.

Put another way, 63.7 percent of the $8.67 billion in 2019 growth took place in Metro Atlanta and North Georgia versus 36.3 percent in the combined Middle Georgia, South Georgia and Coastal Georgia regions.

Moreover, the number of counties that saw their GDPs decline dropped from 31 in 2018 to 22 in 2019, and most were scattered loosely across the state, in ones and two — as this map suggests.

That said, it remains to be seen whether this new GDP represents a turning point or a mere pause in a long-term trend, but it marks the first time in about a decade — since the Great Recession — that the gap between Metro Atlanta and the rest of the state has not widened. Metro Atlanta was initially hit harder by that economic downturn, but it recovered faster and, until 2019, had continued to grow its share of the state’s economic output.

These latest results appear to owe to several factors, including:

—Relatively anemic growth in the 12-county Metro Atlanta region. Two Metro Atlanta counties suffered actual declines in their GDP. DeKalb saw its near-$38 billion economy slip one-tenth of a percentage point while Clayton, with more than $17 billion in GDP, dropped 1.5 percent. Even Gwinnett County, which is accustomed to robust growth, grew its $44 billion economy by less than one percent. The best performers in Metro Atlanta were suburban counties — Henry County, on the southside, with 6.7 percent in growth, and Cherokee County, to the north, with a 4.6 percent growth rate.

—What may be a sudden downturn in a previously vibrant area of northeast Georgia. In particular, seven contiguous counties in northeast Georgia (see map at right) that had been posting relatively impressive year-over-year growth all saw their numbers decline in 2019. Included in this group is Oglethorpe County, whose 10.3 percent decline — from $317.5 million to $284.7 million was the worst in the state. These seven counties all had among the lowest growth rates in the state.

—A resurgence in southwest Georgia. If typically vibrant counties in northeast Georgia suffered an unexpected decline in 2019, 10 counties in usually beleaguered deep southwest Georgia enjoyed a major uptick. Baker County, which had been losing population and GDP for several years, posted the biggest one-year gain in the state: 21.9 percent. That grew Baker County’s GDP from $72.3 million to $88.1 million in a single year. But it was only one of 10 contiguous deep southwest Georgia counties that posted double-digit increases (see map at left). Many of them were, to be sure, bouncing back from declines in previous years, but the appearance of a regional trend would seem to be significant.

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.

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).

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.

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.

___________

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.

A few other nuggets:

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

Connecting the Dots: Health, Education, Economics and Politics in Rural Georgia.