Arkansas Highway 180 in Northwest Arkansas (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Each year, the Northwest Arkansas Council and University of Arkansas Center for Business and Economic Research share the State of the Northwest Arkansas Region Report, which is a tool to evaluate the region’s economic performance.
According to the recent report, the Northwest Arkansas Council announced that the organization’s five-year strategic plan for 2010-2015 was completed one year ahead of schedule. Therefore, the Northwest Arkansas Council created a blueprint for development that outlines new peer regions and strategies for 2015-2017.
The new three-year plan benchmarks NWA against other contemporary, high-performing regions such as Austin, Des Moines, Madison, and Raleigh-Durham. These are bigger regions, which raises the bar for NWA in a variety of areas.
The 2015 State of the Region Report compares Northwest Arkansas with these geographies in the areas of gross domestic product, employment, unemployment, establishment growth, per capita personal income, average annual wages, poverty, educational attainment, research and development, homeownership cost, and commuting time.
We at On Time Logistics are excited about this development. We believe it’s always important to set high standards and it appears that the new plan does that. The standards have always been high and now we are reaching even higher. It appears that we have some work to do in several areas, but we’re up to the task.
So how did we do in these new comparisons? Here’s a summary:
- Metropolitan GDP-We grew at a slower rate than the Austin-Round Rock region, but at 4.6 percent our growth was faster than the peer average.
- Employment-At 2.9 percent, our employment grew faster than most peer regions and the entire state of Arkansas, but still lagged behind both Austin-Round Rock and Raleigh.
- Unemployment-NWA had the second highest unemployment rate in 2014 (4.6 percent) but that was lower than the state and national average.
- Establishment growth-the number of businesses grew at a rate of .9 percent, which was the slowest among peer regions and the nation.
- Per capita personal income-per capital personal incomes in NWA tend to be higher than other parts of the state but lower than peer regions and the nation.
- Annual wages-NWA wages are consistently lower than in peer regions. Our average annual wages grew by a total of 9 percent from 2010-2014.
- Poverty-NWA’s 2014 poverty rate was 16.2 percent, which was a .6 percent decrease from the year before. Unfortunately, NWA’s poverty rate is the second highest among peer regions. It is, however, a lower poverty rate than the rest of the state.
- Educational attainment-27.9 percent of adults over the age of 25 had earned at least a bachelor’s degree in 2014. This places NWA last in educational attainment among peer regions.. However, from 2010 to 2014 the proportion of adults age 25 and older in NWA with at least a bachelor’s degree grew by 2.8 percent, which was a bigger increase than the nation, state, and all peer regions except one.
- Academic research and development- All the peer regions’ universities were ranked within the top 50 in research expenditures nationwide while the UA research expenditures ranked 136th among research universities in that year.