Spanning from Memphis to Mountain City, Tennessee not only has its three grand divisions of the state — east, middle and west — but the state’s 95 counties also differ widely in their makeup and economies.
The jobless rate in rural Lauderdale, Clay and Bledsoe counties, for instance, is twice as high as unemployment in the suburbs of Nashville. Family incomes in Williamson County average three times as much as the family incomes in Grundy and Hancock counties. And the population of Rutherford County outside of Nashville has jumped by 7% since the 2020 census, while in the same time, the census bureau says population declined in seven other Tennessee counties.
So when studies or forecasts are done about the Tennessee economy as a whole, the statewide results may not reflect what is happening in a particular community.
“It’s been my view for some time that there is no such thing as a state economy,” Howard Wall, an economist at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, said in a recent interview on the UTC campus. “There are a number of metro areas that happen to be in the same state.”