Giving Compass' Take:

• At Brookings, Marcela Escobari and Ian Seyal summarize a visualization of revealing data on job growth and industry location.

• Why is it so important to understand trends in jobs and industry? How can we use data to smartly adjust decisions in industry? How can you support research on useful data? 

• Here's how data can positively impact progress in other disciplines.

This visualization, A Roadmap for Growing Good Jobs, intends to show that tailored data can help cities drive dynamic growth that also creates opportunity for the local workforce. The methods underlying our analysis are designed to accommodate a wide range of regional needs and goals. However, these insights and strategies are not meant to be prescriptive. Rather, they present a set of options to inform regional development based on different priorities and tailored to the strengths of each city. Local contexts and priorities are crucial to meaningful interpretations of the data.

The research suggests a “capabilities-based approach” to regional economic development. Capabilities are the hard-to-measure qualities of a city that allow industries to appear and thrive in a given location. They can include everything from infrastructure to talent and institutions. One of the key insights of the Economic Complexity methodology is that these capabilities can be measured implicitly by examining which industries tend to co-locate in the same Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA).

“Growing cities that work for all” found that the current industrial composition of each city partially determines its future industrial evolution. Intuitively, cities that possess more of the capabilities an industry requires tend to grow that industry faster. A city’s ability to host an industry is captured in a metric called Feasibility. Feasibility measures the implicit capability overlap of a given industry with all the industries present in a city. It is one of the key measures used in the “Planning for the Future” section of the visualization, as it identifies the short list of industries that are likely to deliver growth, industrial diversification, or quality jobs.

Read the full article about data for job and industry growth by Marcela Escobari and Ian Seyal at Brookings.