How high tech is the Tenth District?

Abstract

Newspapers in the Tenth Federal Reserve District generally keep a close eye on where their cities rank in national studies of high-tech activity. Readers have good reason to be interested in how “high tech” their communities are, despite the recent downturn in the sector. High-tech workers are among the best paid of all workers and, if these recent studies are correct, an area’s failure to embrace the “New Economy” could result in a lower standard of living and fewer opportunities for residents down the road. But studies of high-tech cities, which are usually produced by think tanks, trade groups, or business magazines, have varying results and usually focus only on major metropolitan areas. As a result, it is often difficult for policymakers, businesses, and residents in the Tenth District to understand where they really stand in the “New Economy” and how they got there.> Wilkerson shows that much of the Tenth District is quite high tech, once the geographic distribution of the region’s population is taken into account. Across the country, the overarching determinant for the amount of local high-tech activity appears to be a metro’s size. Because the Tenth District has relatively few large cities, the level of high-tech activity in most district states falls short of the national average. But analysis of high-tech activity in metro areas shows that nearly all of the district’s larger metros exceed national averages for cities their size. In fact, several of the region’s larger cities rank among the most high-tech places in the nation.Technology ; Federal Reserve District, 10th