2008 Top Ten Metropolitan and Micropolitan Areas

POLICOM specializes in studying the dynamics of local economies. From its research, it determines if an area is growing or declining, what is causing this to happen, and offers ideas and solutions to communities to improve the situation.

To create its studies, POLICOM annually examines and measures the 363 Metropolitan and 577 Micropolitan areas in the United States when new data is released. It calculates growth rates, consistency trends, industry averages, and other factors for each area. More than one hundred economic elements are measured for multiple time periods. For most of the economic issues, POLICOM ranks the areas to determine relative improvement or decline. When the “smoke clears,” each area is ranked for more than 1,000 sectors or time periods.

One source of data used is the Regional Economic Information System (REIS) data published by the Bureau of Economic Analysis, US Department of Commerce. This is an extremely comprehensive data set and is gleaned from administrative records created by multiple government agencies. Data for 2006 was released in April, 2008.

POLICOM is happy to share with you the “Top Ten” ranked Metropolitan and Micropolitan areas for more than 100 issues using REIS data.

The Average Annual Growth Rate was calculated by determining the percentage increase for the five year period from 2002 through 2006 (2001 base year) and averaging the annual amount. The results are under the column 2006-2002. The actual amount for 2006 is shown and ranked.

Many times smaller areas will have the highest growth percentage. If an area has 10,000 jobs and it adds 1,000, it has a 10% gain.

However, a large area which has 1,000,000 jobs and adds 90,000 jobs only had a 9% gain.

Basically it is typically very hard for large areas to have high growth percentages.

The actual amount for 2006 is provided so you can see if the growth rate might be the result of being “small.”

The chart for Population is a good example. Palm Coast had the fastest growth rate in Population but is a very small area, ranking 354th among the 363 Metropolitan areas. More impressive for their growth rates are Las Vegas, Raleigh, and Phoenix as they are large areas.

The rankings are available via a PDF file which includes 23 pages.  To download or view the "Top Ten Rankings,"
CLICK HERE.