Friday, May 20, 2005

Online Location Quotient calculator for US

A Handy New Tool from the Bureau of Labor Statistics
One of the most frequently used measures of industrial specialization or clustering is the location quotient. Up until now, computing location quotients has been a tedious and time consuming task. A new tool produced by the Bureau of Labor Statistics--the Location Quotient calculator--makes exploring LQs easy. The location quotient indicates whether a particular industry represents a larger (or smaller) proportion of a particular local economy than it does the national economy. A location quotient of one means an industry makes up the same share of a regional economy as it does of the larger (usually national economy). High location quotients (much greater than one) indicate that a region is relatively specialized in a particular industry.

The tool lets you compute location quotients for states, counties or metropolitan areas (hint: scroll to the bottom of the geographic area drop- down list for metro areas). The tool lets you compute location quotients for selected industries, or all available industries at once. You can specify up to three different areas for comparison, for example, to compare the location quotients for transportation equipment manufacturing in three different metropolitan areas. The site includes data from 2001to 2003; you can theoretically compute location quotients down to the level of NAICS six-digit industries, but as a practical matter you'll encounter data suppressions for sub-state areas for anything less than 3-digit industry sub-sectors.

http://data.bls.gov/LOCATION_QUOTIENT/servlet/lqc.ControllerServlet

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