Looking for specific BLS data

September 17, 2015 5:04 AM

Does the U.S. government publish data about economic growth by sector AND by metro area? I am trying to compile some data for the economic outlook of a city/metro area. Essentially I want something like the BLS's job outlook numbers for different career fields, but localized to specific metro areas. Does this exist somewhere?

Specifically the questions I'm hoping the data might be able to answer would be:
- Which cities have the most jobs in [insert career] today?
- Which cities are projected to have the most jobs created in [insert career] over the next 10 years?
- And the inverse of those questions: which cities are expected to decline in those numbers over the next 10 years?

I'm also interested in collating some figures like median home price and transportation cost / commute times, but I consider that a bonus.

posted by deathpanels to Computers & Internet (6 answers total)

It exists in Washington state where I live. The state employs five or six economists to do local area analysis like this. I used them a lot when I was doing veterans employment assistance to document demand and decline in local area occupations. I would certainly think that Illinois would do something similiar. This is the abstract of one of the reports:

"The attached four-page, July 2015 edition of the Grant County Labor Area Summary (LAS) analyzes these not seasonally adjusted nonfarm employment and civilian labor force figures, focusing on year-over-year (between July 2014 and July 2015) and average annual trends (between 2013 and 2014). To supplement this report, following are two graphs comparing benchmarked Civilian Labor Force (CLF) and total nonfarm employment changes in Grant County and in Washington during the last twelve months:"

Maybe start with a good research librarian?
posted by seasparrow at 6:36 AM on September 17, 2015

Response by poster: Just to clarify, I want to compare across states – i.e., a comparison of the top 50 most populous metro areas in the U.S.
posted by deathpanels at 7:16 AM on September 17, 2015

Have you poked around the Census economic data? Quarterly Workforce Indicators seems interesting. County Business Patterns might be useful too.
posted by desjardins at 8:14 AM on September 17, 2015

Best answer: Here is contact information for the BLS employment projections. Names, phone numbers, and emails (both general and for each individual). Someone there should be able to help you or point you in the right direction if such data exist.
posted by Mr.Know-it-some at 10:29 AM on September 17, 2015 [1 favorite]

This page provides an index of a bunch of the current BLS metropolitan area employment estimates. Not sure why the current dataset is from May 2014, though. You can click through to get pages like this one for San Francisco-San Mateo-Redwood City. If you click through on the job description, you'll get pages like this one for Market Research Analysts and you can scroll down to get the top metro areas for that job category, either by total employment or relative to other categories.

I don't know if BLS produces job forecasts by metro area. The main portal for job forecasts appears to be their Occupational Outlook Handbook. Maybe dig around in there?
posted by mhum at 1:25 PM on September 17, 2015

The Occupational Employment Statistics page may have what you need.
posted by teleri025 at 7:07 AM on September 18, 2015