How does people affect the economy

Las Vegas and Orlando are among the metros with the current highest unemployment rates in the country; Las Vegas had the fourth highest unemployment rate of all metropolitan areas, over five points higher than the national rate in November Cities with core industries that have been negatively impacted by the COVID recession have broader spillover effects e.

In the aggregate, the devastation of a core industry can mean the decline of others nearby, like with manufacturing in the Rust Belt in the second half of the twentieth century. As a result, metropolitan areas concentrated in hard-hit industries are likely to see negative ripple effects throughout their economy lower tax revenue, less spending, etc. As we will explore, the metropolitan areas concentrated in industries susceptible to COVID tend to have larger Hispanic or Latino populations as well.

Being a destination city for travel includes the economic benefit of both personal tourism and corporate conferences; COVID devastated both as people stopped travelling altogether. Figure 3 shows the portion of nonfarm workers employed by the leisure and hospitality sector in a metro area in , the change in the total unemployment rate percentage points from November to November , and the proportion of the metro area that is Hispanic or Latino for areas with data for each metric.

Las Vegas, for example, has the second highest concentration of jobs in hospitality and faced the second largest increase in unemployment behind Atlantic City. Orlando also stands out with a particularly large hospitality workforce and substantial increase in overall unemployment; both rank among the top 50 metros in November unemployment.

Seattle and Washington D. Tourism-dependent cities like Las Vegas and Orlando also tend to have larger Hispanic or Latino populations, while cities with below-average changes in unemployment like Seattle and Washington D. The decline in travel and hospitality employment was similar across the cities we analyze. The leisure and hospitality industry in Las Vegas suffered a However, the employment effects in non-core industries seemed to have been compounded or mitigated by core industry performance.

By contrast, almost a quarter of Washington, D. While COVID wreaked havoc on industries that depend on in-person contact, distancing restrictions caused a sharp increase in the usage of technology for remote work and business transactions.

Relative to other industries, information technology and government have done well. Between February and April , sales for non-store retailers i. Facebook also announced plans to hire 10, additional workers in April As Table 2 indicates, job losses in information and technology were generally in-line with or slightly below total job loss rates for technology hub cities like Seattle and San Francisco, as well as for D.

Interestingly, only in Las Vegas and D. This could be the result of classification, where information industry jobs that are part of hospitality and leisure or government are classified differently, although one might expect similar impacts in Orlando and Reno. Acceleration of long-run trends towards increased technology use benefits technology firms and, consequently, the communities where technology firms are located.

Understanding the impact of its decisions is important to being able to make the right decision from both the perspective of both the business and the community.

But, how do you measure the impact of a business on the local economy? Typically this is done by looking at the contribution to the economy in terms of either Gross Value Added GVA or employment.

Find out more about economic impact assessment. Tom Beagent. Will Evison. The US, Canada, Switzerland and Germany were among countries deemed least likely to be significantly impacted. The report warned that billions across the world were at a heightened risk of missing out on future economic opportunities and the benefits of a resilient global community.

Moving to clean energy is key to combating climate change, yet in the past five years, the energy transition has stagnated. Plus, improvements in the energy intensity of the global economy the amount of energy used per unit of economic activity are slowing. In energy intensity improved by 1. Effective policies, private-sector action and public-private cooperation are needed to create a more inclusive, sustainable, affordable and secure global energy system.

Benchmarking progress is essential to a successful transition. The 10 countries that score the highest in terms of readiness account for only 2. Additionally, the Mission Possible Platform MPP is working to assemble public and private partners to further the industry transition to set heavy industry and mobility sectors on the pathway towards net-zero emissions. Is your organisation interested in working with the World Economic Forum? Find out more here. This is echoed in the Swiss Re Institute report.

So we must act now to mitigate the risks and to reach net-zero targets. This will require cooperation between the public and private sectors to speed up the transition to net zero, it says.

They can be programmatic, such as for grants or other programs. They can be colloquial, such as how people refer to themselves and see their place in the universe. Hardcastle said these definitions may conflict or complement each other. Someone may have a perception of being rural, but that perception may not necessarily match up to the micropolitan, metropolitan, official, or research-oriented definitions for their community.

Distance and density may not always be a good indicator of ruralness or rurality. How important is the geographic unit, Hardcastle asked. Talking about rural characteristics, he gave as an example a call he received when his population estimates were released. He contrasted this to an idea by Popper and Popper and Popper et al. They described the loss of population, but also the potential revival of that area through going back to a natural, more steady-state ecosystem where more of the natural grassland is reestablished.

Loss of population and rural characteristics can have different interpretations, Hardcastle said. Losing population does not have to mean that the community is lost. How those two points intersect is how an institution or a community is seen and what makes it unique. For instance, a hardware store could be locally owned and operated responding to local needs horizontal integration but get goods through a national or regional distribution chain vertical integration.

That can be compared to a national chain that establishes national. Hardcastle noted that governance does not just mean local governments, but the larger institutional political system within a community.

At times, older entrenched interests in communities have to address changing economies, economic situations, or even environmental situations. For example, he said, in one rural county, water is being depleted through mining while people still hold onto agricultural watering. There is an imbalance between the older agricultural interest and the mining interest. Also, local governments tend to have small staff and limited resources and are serviced by volunteers. They are often frustrated by having to deal with federal or state regulations, he observed.

Regarding the economy for local rural communities, Christaller talked about the idea of an intercepted economy. Some Nevada communities are isolated, but some also are intercepted, said Hardcastle, such as Elko, which is trying to grow between Salt Lake City and Reno. Those two very large economies are competing for any services that get in there. The other communities are going to be intercepted between them. In economies that boom and bust over time, as seen in the western region, overcapacity from the boom has to be reabsorbed over time.

Hardcastle noted that changing tastes or markets often influence movement of people, such as senior citizens returning to central cities. That is an indication that preferences are changing. To market themselves, for example, some locations look at instituting public art to draw people in and get them out of their cars.

Other areas sell themselves as being patriotic and a place to visit. Micropolitan areas classified as frontier are on average 47 percent rural and have an RUCC of 6.

Non-core frontier areas are on average 71 percent rural, with an RUCC of 8. Micropolitan areas are less dependent on resource extraction, but extraction remains a very prominent sector.

The biggest difference is that they have larger heath care, retail, and tourist sectors. Micropolitan areas serve as service centers for the surrounding region, he explained. The outlying county in this analysis, according to Hardcastle, was Storey County with 93 percent of its population classified as rural. It is classified as medium metro, not a frontier county with a 2 RUCC designation because it is part of the Reno metropolitan statistical area.

It is also the site for the Tesla gigafactory with 6, direct jobs. Local agencies have been looking at the plant and its impact on the region.

Some comparisons for the potential impact of agglomeration economics have been made to other metropolitan statistical areas, such as Provo, Utah. More appropriate comparisons might be to combined statistical areas because the Reno-Carson City-Fernley, Nevada, combined statistical area captures the region that will be impacted.

He said this project illustrates two points by other panel members: location matters for agglomeration, and impact depends on the specific location. For example the impact of the Tesla plant would be different if it had been sited in Washoe County with different multiplier effects. Also, as David Plane pointed out, there are different levels of hierarchies, and the combined statistical area concept is one of those hierarchies.

Hardcastle addressed some issues relating to technology and change. For example, mining is often thought of as building tunnels or digging holes, but technological changes have increased production and lowered the cost per worker.

In contrast, cable television was developed first for the rural part of the country in especially mountainous regions. That technology has become ubiquitous and has impacted the delivery of information across the country. It is interesting, he noted, that rural areas are now getting broadband. Brown asked Plane about reconceptualizing density by changing the denominator so rather than a geographic unit, it would be a measure of time such as travel time, and then asked about the numerator.

He suggested thinking about density as the number of social interactions or transactions or something else that expresses the reality of the social and economic life that occurs in geographic regions. Plane responded that traffic might be an interesting variable. However, he observed, one needs something that can be measured. Brown observed that Barry Wellman, a network analyst, has worked on the density of social interactions to show how people in social relationships in metropolitan areas have changed over time; what appeared to be a loss of locality was a more extensive locality within the metropolitan areas Wellman and Hampton, Plane commented that much big data research is very much in that mode.

She clarified respondents were asked to exclude school employment. An example of where activity in space and time becomes very important is a labor market area because people often have two or three jobs. Plane responded that the single-minded focus on commuting time is the key issue. It has its problems, but asked if there are data to go beyond that. For example, he said, people migrate because it is a constrained world and they are likely to move to places where they can find jobs. He added for other kinds of activities, maybe the actual market areas for different goods and services to identify spatiality should be looked at.

Lobao pointed out the policy-making unit is also important. She commented because of decentralization, counties and municipalities are increasingly important to making policy.

He noted the respondents in the most nonadjacent, nonmetropolitan category saw no problem with the quality of their public schools. Lobao responded that quality was not the real issue. This is similar to a quality-of-life measure, with subjective versus objective measures. County administrators subjectively assess their schools as good.

Gregory Hooks McMaster University observed that pressures for funding formulas and policy call for an answer. He said he has started to wonder how often it is useful to reduce a multidimensional concept to a zero-one variable. Hardcastle referred to an analysis of workforce development in underserved rural communities conducted by a colleague. It was hard to find data at the county level and to relate a range of ruralness and urbanness to anything meaningful about workforce development.

Sometimes, definitions need to be cleaned up for policy discussions so that conceptually there is a clearer, common sense theme that people who write grants, for example, could utilize. Weber observed that rural classification systems need to assess the impact of context on outcomes.

The context people live in affects whether they are poor and whether they have a job. Density affects outcomes and distance; remoteness affects outcomes. While it is not possible to change. What else can be changed about context? A classification system that would identify places that need investment to change undesirable outcomes would be invaluable, he suggested.

Michael Ratcliffe commented that the Census Bureau receives many questions, challenges, and complaints about where boundaries are drawn. These challenges are made because the line that defines urban may keep a community from achieving a programmatic goal.

For example, in examining the criteria for urbanized areas for the Census, they were considering the correct distance for jumping across low-density, intervening territory that separates two areas of high density, the core and an outlying urban use.