The U.S. unemployment rate is near its 50-year low, but the portion of the population in the labor force is also near a 40-year low.

Although North Dakota’s per capita gross domestic product (GDP) has declined since 2013, the energy boom in earlier years gave the state the fastest increase over the past 10- and 20-year periods, according to an SSTI analysis of recently updated state GDP data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis. Beyond North Dakota, the 10 years from 2008 to 2018 benefitted per capita GDP in states with a prominent knowledge economy, led by New York, California, Washington and Massachusetts. In general, per-capita gross product serves as a useful metric because it can show a state’s relative economic performance against its peers and over time. This article examines state GDP per capita over the past 20 years.*

Many regional economic development strategies emphasize employment in manufacturing or high-tech, as these industries tend to provide well-paying jobs. Through an analysis of American Community Survey five-year data for 2013-2017, SSTI assessed state-level employment concentration within these sectors.

Despite its limitations, publicly available data on research and development (R&D) expenditures remains one of the best metrics for measuring state progress in the innovation economy. Defined as the sum of multiple National Science Foundation (NSF) measures – including business and industry R&D, higher education R&D, and R&D at federally funded centers – total R&D has skyrocketed nationwide over the past 15 years, though some states have experienced an outsized portion of this growth.

How has the intensity of research and development (R&D) performance changed across states and over time? As a follow up to an article in last week’s Digest that examined changes in total R&D expenditures for each state over the 15-year period from 2002 to 2016, this week’s Useful Stats focuses on R&D intensity.

As the largest public funder of biomedical research in the world, NIH awards are of particular importance to the technology-based economic development community. Including new data for FY 2017 and FY 2018, this edition of Useful Stats serves as an update to an August 2017 article highlighting NIH awards by state over the past decade. In FY 2018, NIH awarded a total of $28.3 billion in funds to the 50 states and territories.

This month, SSTI research has examined changes in total R&D and total R&D intensity for each state over a 15-year period from 2002 to 2016. In this final installment of the series, this article looks at how the performance of R&D in the states changed over time.

Home to the Research Triangle Park and top-tier research universities like Duke University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the Durham-Chapel Hill metropolitan area led all regions in per capita NIH funding in FY 2018 and placed sixth in total funding that year, according to a new analysis by SSTI. This edition of Useful Stats looks at all NIH awards at the regional level over the five-year period between FY 2014 and FY 2018.

Taking a deeper dive into R&D expenditures at U.S. institutions of higher education, this week’s edition of Useful Stats examines the fields in which this R&D was performed at the metropolitan level in 2018.

PitchBook and NVCA’s Venture Monitor for 2019 largely depicts continued trends from 2018: $100 million-plus investments, $2 million-plus average for angel and seed deals, and more than 10,000 investments of more than $100 billion. In a few cases, 2019 data suggests average deal sizes may have peaked in 2018, but more time is needed to clarify the trend.

Building on SSTI’s recent analysis of county-level GDP by industry, this edition moves beyond a single year and examines the changes in real — adjusted for inflation — county GDP and the changes in industry-specific contributions to county GDP for the 10-year period from 2009 to 2018. As shown in the interactive map below, the total 10-year growth rate for counties averaged approximately 21 percent.

Real personal income — a measure of purchasing power that connects income to costs — has grown within states at an average rate of 1.5 percent per person since 2012, according to data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis. The average American’s experienced income growth, however, appears to vary wildly depending on location.

Federal funding for S&E R&D grew by $7.2 billion from 2002 to 2016, reaching more than $31.6 billion. This represents a 29.4 percent increase during the period, or approximately 2.0 percent per year, according to an SSTI analysis of data from the National Science Foundation’s National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics.

Across the country, there are nearly 6.9 million scientists and engineers, representing 4.8 percent of the nation’s workforce. There are 20 states having at least 100,000 workers in these occupations. Scientists and engineers are concentrated around the nation’s capital, making up the largest share of the workforce in Washington D.C., Maryland, and Virginia. From 2003 to 2017, the number of scientists and engineers grew the fastest in Arkansas, North Dakota, and Utah.

NVCA and PitchBook released Venture Monitor 3Q 2018 this week. The highlight data point in the report is that total U.S. venture capital investment in 2018 is on pace to break $100 billion for the year — and, in fact, to break $110 billion. At the same time, deal volume is on pace to be at the lowest level since 2012, with just 6,583 deals reported to date in 2018.

One of the best ways to measure the effectiveness of state programs intended to encourage the success of SBIR applications is the approval-rate of their submissions. Although this data has been historically unavailable across every federal agency, it is now accessible for the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the second largest provider of SBIR/STTR awards, according to a 2018 Digest report. The NIH distributed $446.2 million in SBIR/STTR awards in 2017, with every state except North and South Dakota receiving an award. Although California and Massachusetts had the most successful SBIR/STTR applications in 2017, accounting for roughly one-third of the total when combined, neither state ranked among the top 10 in success rate. NIH SBIR/STTR applications in Oregon (29 percent success rate), Vermont (25 percent success rate), and Wisconsin (23 percent success rate) were the most likely to be approved over the ten-year period from 2008 to 2017. Each of these states, as well as many others with high success rates, offer assistance with proposals such as technical support programs and Phase 0 grants.

Since 2011, more than half of the nation's new investment in business research and development has come from California companies, and more than three-quarters has come from the top five states, according to an SSTI analysis of recently released NSF data.

Higher education R&D expenditures (HERD) grew by 38.9 percent from 2008 to 2017, an increase of more than $21 billion, according to an SSTI analysis of recently released data from the National Science Foundation’s National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics. From 2016 to 2017, HERD grew by $3.8 billion, the largest year-over-year increase since 2010-2011.

For the first time, the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis has released prototype gross domestic product (GDP) data at the county level. This preliminary data, which includes the years 2012 to 2015, provides a granular look at county-level productivity. Furthermore, standardizing this data by population – GDP per capita – makes it a useful metric for comparing counties over time and across the country.  From 2012 to 2015, per capita GDP grew in 82 percent of counties.

Earlier this month, the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) published its 2017 estimates on state-level real gross domestic product (GDP). Per-capita gross product is a useful metric because it can show a state’s relative performance against its peers and over time. SSTI has prepared a spreadsheet showing 10 years of real per capita gross product by state, as well as an interactive map showing changes over the 1-year, 5-year, and 10-year periods. As more data becomes available, a future Digest issue will cover this topic at the metropolitan level. 

In last week’s Digest, SSTI looked at several macro venture capital (VC) trends, this week’s Useful Stats article focuses on regional trends as well as provides downloadable VC stats by state by quarter from Q1 of 2016 to Q2 of 2018. The data includes median VC deal size, VC deals, and VC dollars invested.

Across the nation, R&D at colleges and universities plays an important role in generating promising inventions, training our STEM talent pipeline, and supporting regional economic development. An SSTI analysis of National Science Foundation data finds that higher-education R&D (HERD) is a multi-billion dollar industry that directly employs nearly one million personnel on projects and grants in the United States. However, the locations of R&D projects and personnel differ greatly by state and region.

Across the country, companies reported nearly $300 billion in self-funded and self-performed domestic R&D in 2015, according to recent data from the National Science Foundation’s Business R&D and Innovation Survey (BRDIS), with nearly one-third of this total ($95.0 billion) coming from California. Businesses in Wyoming, Washington D.C., and Utah reported the greatest increase in self-funded and self-performed R&D from 2010 to 2015.

Given higher education’s role in generating the knowledge that catalyzes innovative new technologies developed by high-growth startups, R&D conducted at institutions of higher education is one of the most important metrics for evaluating an area’s innovation economy. This edition of Useful Stats examines NSF’s recently updated Higher Education R&D (HERD) survey, finding that most states, although not all, experienced growth in HERD expenditures from 2018 to 2019.

Higher levels of business creation can be linked to the presence of innovation in a state through entrepreneurial activity and transitioning to new industries, and this edition of Useful Stats examines data from the Census Bureau’s recently updated Business Dynamics Statistics (BDS) on net establishment formation and the job creation stemming from those establishments in 2019. While figures vary widely among the states, most saw growth in both net establishment creation and net job creation in 2019; this data is prior to the onset of the pandemic in early 2020.