ComentariosHallazgosPerspectivasExplicativos
Tema
Regional Development
26 piezas
Piezas
- ExplicativoWorkforce & Skills
What a state unemployment rate leaves out
The rate is a fraction whose denominator moves. By the end you will know why it can fall while a state's workforce shrinks, and why it counts residents when payroll figures count jobs.
- PerspectivaIndustrial Policy
Ten of fifty-one jurisdictions are concentrated in both production and engineering work, and the record cannot show a cluster forming in any of them
Twenty-five jurisdictions employ production workers more intensively than the nation and twenty-three do the same for architecture and engineering, but only ten do both. The rate at which people quit a job, which is the closest thing the record holds to the movement a cluster runs on, gave its lowest reading of the window in 2025.
- ExplicativoRegional Development
What a new business application actually counts
Business applications are the fastest local signal of new enterprise, and the most often oversold. By the end you will know what the filing is, how far it sits from a business with employees, and what the count cannot tell a city.
- ExplicativoRegional Development
Building permits and what they signal before the construction shows up
A permit is an authorisation, not a building. By the end you will know why the series moves before construction spending does, and why a single month of it is close to useless on its own.
- ComentarioIndustrial Policy
A state incentive buys a location decision, not national capacity
Plant construction spending rose from an annual rate of 75 billion dollars in 2020 to 244 billion in 2024; manufacturing output ended 2025 4.3 index points above 2020, and employment three hundred thousand below its 2023 peak. Plant takes years to run, so those readings are not yet a verdict.
- PerspectivaTrade & Investment
A foreign ministry cannot spend attention on fifty states, and should not try
California holds 39,431,263 residents and Wyoming 587,618, and each sends the same two senators to Washington. A ministry with a finite diary has to decide which of those two facts it is optimising against, because the rankings they produce are not the same.
- ExplicativoInfrastructure
What makes an industrial site shovel ready
Site readiness is a list of specific permissions and physical connections, not a mood. By the end you will know what a certified site has actually cleared, what it has not, and which constraint usually decides the timetable.
- PerspectivaWorkforce & Skills
The labour force fell in 39 of 51 jurisdictions in a single month
Between June and July 2026 the civilian labour force fell in 39 states and the District of Columbia's column, and rose in twelve. The movements are tiny, they point the same way, and the file that records them cannot tell you whether that means anything.
- ComentarioIndustrial Policy
A facility count is not a pollution count
Our environment dataset holds one number per state, the count of facilities reporting to the EPA Toxics Release Inventory. It is a measure of industrial density, the file says so plainly, and I am not going to chart it.
- ComentarioWorkforce & Skills
Jobs are counted where they are done, not where workers live
In July 2026 the District of Columbia held 179.7 jobs for every 100 people in its own labour force, and Maryland held 87.9. The two numbers are measuring different things, and state rankings that put them side by side quietly mislead.
- PerspectivaWorkforce & Skills
The states that make the most things are not the states with the most engineers
Of the eight states where production work is most concentrated, four hold less than the national share of architecture and engineering jobs and two more hold barely the national share. That gap, not the incentive package, is the binding constraint on where a complex facility can be built and run.
- PerspectivaRegional Development
Read a state government the way you would read a credit, not a brochure
State tax collections per resident run from 2,279 dollars in Alaska to 8,028 in Vermont, and the spread describes which layer of government collects rather than how heavily anyone is taxed. The useful questions are what the base is, what it is exposed to, and what the state does not levy at all.
- ComentarioRegional Development
Four states now fund themselves on a price they do not set
Severance is 47.2 percent of North Dakota's state tax collections and 43.9 percent of Alaska's. That is not a revenue line. It is a position in a commodity, held by a government that has to write a budget every year.
- ExplicativoRegional Development
How a balanced-budget rule shapes what a state can offer
Almost every state has to close its books inside a single fiscal year. By the end you will know why that rule pushes economic development toward tax credits and away from cash, and what that swap costs.
- ExplicativoWorkforce & Skills
Personal income per head and the median wage measure different things
One is a mean taken over everybody, the other a middle taken over jobholders. By the end you will know why a state can look rich on one and ordinary on the other, and which question each figure answers.
- PerspectivaRegional Development
The occupation that concentrates pays above its local median in every jurisdiction, and the occupation that spreads pays above it in ten
Computer and mathematical work pays more than the middle job in all fifty-one jurisdictions; production work does so in ten, six of which hold the country's lowest median wages. Production is also the more evenly spread of the two, at or above the national share in 27 jurisdictions against 13.
- ComentarioRegional Development
A house price index is not a house price
Maine's house price index stands at 1044.11 and California's at 974.97. Each state's index is anchored at 100 in the first quarter of 1980, which means the ranking measures appreciation since then and says nothing at all about what a house costs.
- ExplicativoRegional Development
How a tax-increment financing district works
A TIF district pays for public works out of the tax growth those works are meant to cause. By the end you will know what the district captures, who gives it up, and what the argument between supporters and critics is actually about.
- ComentarioRural Economies
Rural broadband went wrong at handover, not at appropriation, and the agency that signed the award should carry the account
The money bought construction, and construction is not a connection: a rural household needs a line that works, at a price it will pay, kept working after the crews have gone. No series in this brief measures a broadband award, so the case rests on mechanism and on what the wage and price data show about the interval between the money and the work.
- HallazgoWorkforce & Skills
The states most crowded with construction workers are mostly drilling and mining
Ranked by construction and extraction jobs per thousand, the top of the table is Wyoming, North Dakota, New Mexico and Alaska. Their own occupational detail shows what is doing the work in that ranking, and it is not building.