State GDP and Personal Income in Q1 2024
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State real GDP growth rates in 2024:1 ranged from Idaho’s 5.0% to South Dakota’s -4.2%. Growth tended to be high in the mountain West and the Southeast. Many highly agricultural states in the Plains saw declines, but Illinois, Ohio, Oregon, and Louisiana also saw drops. Pennsylvania is on the verge of becoming the sixth state with current-dollar GDP exceeding one trillion dollars. The five currently above that threshold are California, Texas, New York, Florida, and Illinois; Pennsylvania’s 2024:1 figure was $998 billion, at an annual rate. No other state exceeds $900 billion.
The distribution of personal income growth was comparable to real GDP. South Carolina first with a 9.5% growth rate, while North Dakota’s .6 % was the lowest. It appears that weakness in farm income held down net earnings in the agricultural regions. As always, the distribution of the growth of transfer payments was erratic and influenced the rankings of total personal income growth, but in this instance, generally slower transfer growth in the Plains merely tended to accentuate the effect of weakness in net earnings. with Nevada again on top with a 6.7% growth rate, while Iowa and North Dakota tied for last with each having a growth rate of 0.8%. Over the last few years, the extension and withdrawal of federal transfers connected to the pandemic often grossly distorted movements in state personal income, and the ranking of states. This has become less evident in recent quarters, though the range of annual growth rates for transfers in 2023:4 did run from 8,1% in Mississippi to -5.0% in Arizona. The large drop in Arizona certainly had a visible effect on its overall income growth; Mississippi’s large gain was less meaningful, since other income components there also grew substantially.
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.
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