Global| Jun 26 2019State Personal Income
|in:Viewpoints
Summary
State personal income growth in the first quarter of 2019 averaged somewhat lower in the first quarter of 2019 than in the fourth quarter of 2018, but the variation in growth was fairly narrow. West Virginia reported the highest rate [...]
State personal income growth in the first quarter of 2019 averaged somewhat lower in the first quarter of 2019 than in the fourth quarter of 2018, but the variation in growth was fairly narrow. West Virginia reported the highest rate of growth, 5.6%, while South Dakota was the only state seeing a decline. Growth was generally low in the Plains states and some other portions of the Middle West, reflecting a sharp drop in farm income. Elsewhere, income growth in both Connecticut and New York trailed the national pace, reflecting declines in property income (dividends, rent and interest), which bore more heavily on the wealthy residents of those states. The drop in property income types explains why some poor states were relatively strong in the first quarter: Maine and New Mexico joined West Virginia in seeing personal income grow at a rate exceeding 5 percent (Arizona was also in that group).
While the typical focus of this release is on the growth rates, levels of personal income are widely skewed across the states. The aggregate income of California residents in 2019:Q1 was, at an annual rate, more than $2 ½ trillion; that of Vermont residents was less than $35 billion. Thus, a comparison of Vermont’s Q1 growth rate of 4.5% (11th in the nation) to California’s 3.1% (34th) hardly reveals much about how the two stand compared to each other!
Charles Steindel
AuthorMore in Author Profile »Charles Steindel has been editor of Business Economics, the journal of the National Association for Business Economics, since 2016. From 2014 to 2021 he was Resident Scholar at the Anisfield School of Business, Ramapo College of New Jersey. From 2010 to 2014 he was the first Chief Economist of the New Jersey Department of the Treasury, with responsibilities for economic and revenue projections and analysis of state economic policy. He came to the Treasury after a long career at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, where he played a major role in forecasting and policy advice and rose to the rank of Senior Vice-President. He has served in leadership positions in a number of professional organizations. In 2011 he received the William F. Butler Award from the New York Association for Business Economics, is a fellow of NABE and of the Money Marketeers of New York University, and has received several awards for articles published in Business Economics. In 2017 he delivered Ramapo College's Sebastian J. Raciti Memorial Lecture. He is a member of the panel for the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia's Survey of Professional Forecasters and of the Committee on Research in Income and Wealth. He has published papers in a range of areas, and is the author of Economic Indicators for Professionals: Putting the Statistics into Perspective. He received his bachelor's degree from Emory University, his Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and is a National Association for Business Economics Certified Business EconomistTM.