Key economic indicators broken down at a county level will soon be available for public finance officers to analyze.
The National Association of Counties (NACo) is scheduled to release in January its first annual economic data tracker, which will summarize how the nation’s 3,069 counties performed in 2013 and are recovering from the 2008 recession. Counties will be measured in the report by gross domestic product growth, unemployment rates, home prices and jobs. The study was conducted by NACO Director of Research Emilia Istrate utilizing data from Moody’s Analytics.
Istrate, who joined NACo on Feb. 4, 2013 after serving as an associate fellow at the Brookings Institution, gave a presentation previewing the soon-to-be released report at the organization’s Dec. 11 Large Urban County Caucus county innovations symposium in New York City. Government finance officials from some of the nation’s largest counties that attended the conference stressed how this economic breakdown will assist them when communicating about important needs to leaders in Washington.
“We at NACo are very interested in what is going on in your county economies because the dynamics within your county economies affect your ability to provide services to your residents and also meet their financial obligations,” said Istrate during her presentation.
Istrate, who holds a doctorate in public policy from George Mason University that focused on regional economic development, described the county tracker as groundbreaking for counties.
“This edition of the County Tracker is a first of its kind analysis of the performance of county economies,” she said. “The focus of the report is on the county economy and not on the county government. While other sources keep track of the recovery of the top 100 U.S. metropolitan economies, no similar study follows county economies’ performance the foundation of the U.S. economy.”
