What's New - November 2003

Site of the Month: US Urban Decline and Growth, 1950 to 2000

November's Site of the Month takes a long-term perspective on the growth (and, in some cases, decline) of US urban areas over the past half century. Jordan Rappaport of the Kansas City Federal Reserve Bank has compiled an excellent set of data on city and metropolitan  population from 1950 to 2000 as part of his analysis of U.S. urban decline and growth. In an article published in the bank's Economic Review, he decomposes population change in each of the 50 largest cities in the US over the past five decades into national, regional, metropolitan and local components, and shows which cities have grown, which have declined, and which have rebounded from earlier declines. Appendix tables report city and metro area populations for each Census year from 1950 to 2000, and compute decadal growth rates. Be warned that Rappaport uses metro definitions that are consistent across the 50 year period, and therefore differ in many ways from current Census Bureau metropolitan definitions. Read the article for an incisive analysis of which cities and metro areas are growing, which are declining, and which are the leaders of an urban renaissance. Then study the data in the appendix tables. You'll come away with a solid picture of what's happening in American cities.
http://www.kc.frb.org/publicat/econrev/Pdf/3q03rapp.pdf


Is Employment Going Up or Down?

Over the past two years, two key indicators of the number of jobs in the economy have followed divergent paths. Payroll employment, based on a survey of employers, shows a loss of a million jobs since November 2001, while a parallel study of households shows a gain of 1.4 million workers. A recent analysis released by the Joint Economic Committee of Congress takes a close look at this perplexing disparity. While comparisons of the two surveys are complicated by a methodological changes the BLS made to the household survey in January, 2003, the JEC analysis concludes this accounts for little of the gap. The gap remains unexplained, but the likely culprits in JEC's view are an increase in self-employment (not counted in the payroll survey) and small businesses (under-represented in payroll survey sample). 
Take a look at this analysis-- A TALE OF TWO EMPLOYMENT SURVEYS--at
http://jec.senate.gov/studies/TwoSurveysUpdated.pdf


Health Care Quality Measures

Measures of quality in health care are often difficult to come by, but Healthgrades.com does a nice job of making it easy to find detailed rankings of health care providers by state. The site provides report cards for hospitals, nursing homes and hospice care providers, based on outcome data obtained from Medicare records. For example, you can drill down by market area within a state to see how different hospitals rank in performing certain medical procedures--everything from heart surgery, to back and neck surgery, to joint replacements--and see how quality compares on a five-point scale with other institutions. Data for some procedures, like obstetrics, are limited to a sub-group of states.
http://www.healthgrades.com/

America's Most Literate Cities

A new study out of the University of Wisconsin, Whitewater, analyzes a variety of literacy related data to rank the largest US cities according to their relative literacy. The study, written by UWW Professor Jack Miller, constructs per-capita measures of literacy for each of 64 cities with populations of more than 250,000, including educational attainment, booksellers, newspaper circulation, library resources and periodicals published. The top ranked cities on a composite of all five measures included Minneapolis, Seattle, and Denver. All the data is available on a nicely laid out website:
http://www.uww.edu/cities/allrnk.html

New Links Added

For November, our new links focus on a set of data sources on information and communication technology and the high tech industry sector. 

Brookings Institution
High Technology Jobs
Analyses and comparisons of metro areas regarding the extent and sources of growth in high technology jobs.
http://www.brookings.edu/es/urban/issues/economy/hightech.htm

Center for Digital Government
Digital State Survey (2002)
Annual ranking of state governments in eight dimensions of digital technology utilization.
http://www.centerdigitalgov.com/center/02digitalstates.phtml

Digital State Survey (2001)
Annual ranking of state governments in eight dimensions of digital technology utilization.
http://www.centerdigitalgov.com/center/01digitalstates.phtml

Digital Cities Survey
Annual rankings of cities by progress in adopting and utilizing digital technologies to improve the delivery of services to their
citizens. Cities grouped in three categories based on population. (2002)
http://www.centerdigitalgov.com/center/02digitalcities.phtml

Federal Communications Commission
Telephone Industry Statistics
Data and information on the telephone industry, for states and areas.
http://www.fcc.gov/ccb/stats

InformationWeek
IT Salary Advisor
Query-based access to data on information technology management and staff salaries, by job function, for 20 metro areas.
http://www.informationweek.com/benchmark/advisor

techies.com
Affordability Index
Ranking of relative affordability of 38 metro areas for information technology workers, based on ACCRA cost-of-living index and average information technology worker salary. Adobe Acrobat (.pdf). (January 2002)
http://inside.techies.com/Research/Pdf/techies_affordability.PDF

Telephia
Wireless Market Analysis
Detailed analyses of wireless telecommunications markets in metro areas. $$
http://www.telephia.com/base_2.php?id=43