The radio audience really responded to the topics of income and wages the last few weeks. Along with the population posts (which I confess I find more interesting) I include another look at wages. I grabbed the data for goods producing and service providing jobs in three North Dakota counties: Cass, Grand Forks, and Williams. Nothing necessarily scientific about the county selection, just three that I know and that will likely give us something to ponder.
Replacement was another idea we talked about in the population analysis class this week. Essentially it is an estimate of the deaths and migratory outflows from the area over a specified period of time and is called replacement because it is what you would need to replace in order for population to remain the same. Not really terribly complicated, but it is a nice complement to the idea of turnover and I generated both the level and the rate for counties in North Dakota.
Keeping with the topics from recent weeks on the radio I thought I would write some more about annual pay. This time I took a look beyond the city of Grand Forks or the county to look at the state as a whole. We can delve back in to the county level again as needed but I was curious about how certain sectors would compare across states.
The topic of annual pay clearly was important to many callers last week and so I thought I would follow up with a bit of a different look at the issue. I wanted to take a look state wide at the hot spots for compensation. This is BLS QCEW data for all industries for all firm sizes. I ran it for the last ten years but we are going to look at three years, 2007, 2012, 2017.
So I exchanged text messages with a friend about local economic data last week, and they asked about the rate of inflation and wage gains and what was happening with that nationally and locally. Enough sources deal with the national picture that I decided to focus on the local picture for this post. I used the CPI (all urban consumers, national average), since that is what my friend discussed, to calculate the real value of annual pay for Grand Forks county.