BEA Stopped Producing County Employment Data by Industry to Everyone’s Detriment
November 20, 2024Over the past two decades, BEA has sought to engage with local economic data users, providing insights about the GDP at the state and county level – helping counties and regions better understand how well they are performing economically. These data have also allowed local leaders to understand their gig economy and entrepreneurial behavior through measures of self-employment as well as offering an understanding of which sectors rely most on self-employed workers.
For example, several years ago, CREC studied the Nashville area workforce. In a particularly poignant example during this week of the Country Music Awards, our wage data didn’t really find much about the music industry. But we knew from anecdotal evidence that it was important. A look at BEA self-employed-by-industry data revealed a huge concentration of musicians and songwriters in the region. We learned from BEA that a very large share of people working in this industry are gig workers – not salaried or hourly employees. However, with the loss of the BEA data on self-employed by industry, this unique fact will be lost, and employment trends for this important segment of the Nashville economy will be much harder to find in the public data.
We know why BEA made the decision to stop producing county employment data by industry: they simply no longer had the resources to do the work. The implications will be to reduce the quality of all employment data available from public and private sources alike, which will have wide-ranging implications for many of us who depend on this data to make smarter workforce and economic development decisions. For that, we are truly disappointed.