Economic Research                                                                                         FUTURE

THE RESEARCH DESIGN

The team began the project by exploring a variety of types of web sites, ranging from those that purport to educate the user about economics in general (such as www.economy.about.com), through those that focus on providing economic data for the region or for the country overall (such as www.missourieconomy.org or www.bea.gov ), to specialized sites that focus on the local economy (such as www.saintjoseph.com).  We also examined literature on economic development, focusing in particular on the series of articles published recently by the Center for the Study of Rural America of the Kansas City Federal Reserve Bank, dealing with economic indicators for the future.

In the next stage of our project, we agreed on some basic themes to include in our presentation of information about the local economy.  One was to show the trend over time in St. Joseph's economy.  For this purpose, we decided to provide a comparison of how things looked in 1980 to how they looked at the dawn of the new millennium, that is, in the year 2000.  Second, we decided to explore the future by focusing on the concept of the "knowledge economy" and the more "forward-looking" economic indicators referred to above that were published recently by the KC Fed.  Finally, we decided it would be helpful to provide links to some of the resources on the web that we found to be most useful.

In the statistical analysis included on the site, our aim was to provide a mix of text and graphics that would convey both description and analysis of the local economy.  This is set against a general background of how the economy performed in the past, accompanied by indicators pointing to future trends.  In order to provide perspective and to make it easier to interpret the information contained in numbers, charts, and graphs, comparisons across time are accompanied by other types of comparisons as well, for example, to larger regions such as the state and nation.  In several areas of the web site, we have also provided comparisons to similar communities.  A few comments may be in order about the criteria we used to choose communities for this purpose.

In sorting through data for comparable communities, it was decided that we would focus on county level data, since that is the local geographical unit for which the most complete and consistent statistics are available.  Our search for Missouri counties similar to Buchanan County focused on several variables, including those most commonly used for this purpose by local development analysts.  These included the following:  population, the portion of the economic base devoted to manufacturing, proximity to an airport, proximity to a large metropolitan area, the presence of a university, and indicators of the socioeconomic status of the population (such as the poverty rate).  The counties we finally settled on were Platte, Cape Girardeau, Jasper, and Franklin.  The statistics below provide some basic data about each location:

Relevant considerations that may not be immediately apparent in the data include the following:  Platte's proximity to our area and to the airport and KC; the presence of an institution of higher education in Cape Girardeau that is of a size and type similar to Missouri Western; the presence in Jasper County of Joplin, a town similar in many ways to St. Joseph; and, finally, Franklin County's proximity to the large metropolitan area of St. Louis, which approximates roughly the proximity of  Buchanan County to the large metropolitan area of Kansas City. 

The plan for the site has been fully developed, and substantial portions of the analysis have been completed and posted.  Those portions of the site marked "under construction" will be completed during the upcoming academic year.  It is hoped that by the end of the year, the data on the site will be sufficiently complete to suggest a variety of interesting questions for future research on the local economic environment.