Business Migration in Maine
In previous blogs I have chartered Maine’s dramatic change from an in-migration state to an out-migration state–see here. Unfortunately, it has been impossible to do the same sort of analysis for businesses . . . until now.
A new website called www.youreconomy.org now tracks business establishments by state, county and metro area. Anecdotely, Mainers have long suspected that businesses were leaving the state. According to the website, between 1993 and 2007, Maine has seen a net job loss of 1.75 percent due to businesses relocating out of the state.
It is important to note this only measures the job loss in the year of out-migration. It does not include any new jobs that were subsequently created by the business in its new resident state. Any such new jobs could also be considered a loss to Maine’s economy.
The website is powered by a new proprietary dataset called the National Establishment Time Series (NETS) database. The website states:
“The NETS (National Establishment Time Series) database used to generate
YourEconomy statistics is large, with 36.5
million records for U.S. establishments that existed any time between
1990 and the present. Of these 36.5 million establishments, 17 million
are still active and report over 500 million employees.”“Dun & Bradstreet (D&B) delivers new data on U.S. establishments to Walls & Associates
at the beginning of each year. The data includes the records from the
D&B DMI (Duns Market Identifier) database and several other smaller
ones. Walls & Associates checks the data for problems, fixes any
that are found, goes back through the entire data set changing all
necessary records, and then delivers the updated and improved data set
to subscribers in the form of the NETS database.”
“NETS has many features that set it apart from other data sets. Among
these are more small businesses, more industry classifications,
historical accuracy, establishment verification vs. business sampling,
business relocation accuracy, and full and quick longitudinal
employment information access.”
Stay tuned to this website/blog for more from this exciting new dataset . . .