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.
With all the discussion surrounding migration these last many months I thought it time to revisit the issue with a specific look at North Dakota. There are many ways to evaluate this issue and I will not go through them all here in one post. These are things that need to be evaluated independently. The issue in this post is the thought that North Dakota has a problem attracting in people. As this first map reveals, that is not really the case.
I caught numerous headlines last week about the President unhappy with the Fed raising rates (here is one from CNN). I am not going to get into whether the President can or cannot criticize the Fed, and I am actually not going to get into whether he should. The question we need to ask is whether or not he is correct about economic policy.