I’m researching the impacts of age structure on retail sales and other measures of economic activity at subnational levels. In many cases I find states are too large an area to look at for meaningful insights. However, I hoped for more from a graph than this.
Same project but this time I am looking at the dependency ratio, so I thought a map showing the way this number is spread across the country was in order. It is something we talk about in the summer demography class so I figured at the least the students would find it a bit interesting.
As part of a bigger research project I am looking at county level retail sales and a variety of population and labor measures so I took a quick stab at mapping out how this looked. The map is for sales per establishment. If you do not normalize by something the map is useless, though what the proper normalization is part of the question. What is interesting is the relative degree of uniformity in sales per establishment. This is a consistency, not a perfect uniformity. It is really surprising where there are hot spots and where there is just more of the same. Gray shaded counties have data suppressed due to privacy concerns and white filled ones are not in the economic census for some reason.