useful stats

Last week, The Digest covered newly released data from the National Science Foundation’s National Center for Science Education Statistics, which found that for the first time in five years, federal funding for higher education research and development increased in both current and constant dollars.

An aging, more diverse workforce is what the Bureau of Labor Statistics foresees in the coming decade, with a declining participation rate, which may in turn restrict economic growth. The new projections released this week echo the downward trend in the rate of labor force participation since the peak of 67.3 percent in early 2000. While recent trends show an increasing level of participation among the 55+ crowd, there has been a decreasing level of participation among 16 to 24-year-olds as school enrollment has increased, as well as a continuing decline among the prime working-age cohort of 25 to 54-year-olds.

An SSTI analysis of the labor force participation rate of the prime age workers for each state revealed a great amount of variation among the states. The map below shows the participation rate for this cohort averaged out over 2014-2016 to account for yearly fluctuations.

With a focus on improving health, driving economic growth, and expanding the country’s research capacity, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services is the largest public funder of biomedical research in the world. Because of NIH’s central role in supporting science, technology, and innovation, a better understanding of the agency’s footprint may be helpful to the technology-based economic development practitioner community.

More than 46 million Americans, nearly 15 percent of the population, lived in poverty in 2015, according to the U.S. Census Bureau’s Small Area Income and Poverty Estimates. Compared against census data for 1999, more than 2,500 of the country’s 3,100-plus counties saw their rate increase. In 2015, 753 counties had a poverty rate of at least 20 percent — and 415 of these counties have been above this threshold in census data dating back to at least 1989.

Every state and the District of Columbia experienced real GDP growth in the fourth quarter of 2016, according to the latest estimates released by the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis. The positive news means only energy-dependent Alaska, North Dakota and Wyoming saw real GDP fall over the year compared to the end of 2015. Experiencing growth of more than 5 percent between 2015 and 2016 were the District of Columbia, Nevada, Utah and Washington.

According to the most recent U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis state personal income data, national per capita income grew 4.0 percent from 2015 to 2016, and growth since 2012 is at 12.0 percent. States are experiencing this growth disparately, however, with five-year growth rates ranging from -0.6 percent (North Dakota) to 17.6 percent (California). Over this period, few states experienced significant changes in their performance relative to their peers — just four states moved more than five rankings — but shifts between income quintiles and variable growth rates suggest that more movement will be witnessed over the next few years.

The number of companies receiving venture capital investments during the first quarter of 2017 dropped 24 percent compared to a year ago, according to the latest NVCA-Pitchbook Venture Capital Monitor, released Tuesday.  Venture capitalists also parted with 12 percent less money during the quarter, suggesting to the report’s authors that 2017 is on pace to compare to 2013 levels.

Once again, more than three-quarters of U.S. venture capital (VC) dollars went to companies in California, New York and Massachusetts in 2016, according to data from the PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC)/CB Insights’ Moneytree Report Explorer. Approximately 53.3 percent of all VC capital went to California companies, down nearly 4.4 percent from the states peak in 2014 (57.7) and down 3.9 percent from 2015.

State and local governments invested $3.8 billion in R&D at institutions of higher education in FY 2015, with the top ten states accounting for $2.3 billion – roughly 59.4 percent of overall spending, according to an SSTI analysis of NSF data. From FY 2011 to FY 2015, total spending remained relatively unchanged (0.1 percent decrease). Over that same period, colleges and universities in 25 states reported increased expenditures from state governments, while 25 and the District of Columbia reported declines.

Nearly half of the U.S. states and the District of Columbia saw a 10 percent or greater increase in higher education R&D expenditures from FY 2010 to FY 2015 with five of those states (Connecticut, Georgia, Massachusetts, Nebraska, and Utah) seeing at least a 20 percent change, according to the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Higher Education Research and Development (HERD) survey for 2015. Between FY10-15 overall U.S. research and development (R&D) spending at U.S.