WebJunction - County Business Patterns - Government Information in the 21st Century

What Sectors are Growing (or Declining)?

For this next exercise, let’s look at San Juan County, New Mexico and its oil & natural gas exploration industry. Go to the Census Bureau web site http://www.census.gov/. Click on Subjects A to Z, click on the letter C and scroll down to County Business Patterns. Click on the link to View in Hypertext Tables (html) - U.S., States, Metro Areas, Counties, and ZIPs.

Select New Mexico from the pull-down menu and click Go. Select San Juan and click Submit.

The first step is to select two representative years; one year should be the most recently available year, in this case, 2003, and a prior year—5 years earlier, 1998. Keep in mind that recession years and economic booms will distort your analysis.

Following the same procedure as we did in Exercise 1 above, we can look up the NAICS code for oil & natural gas. Go to the NAICS web site, http://www.census.gov/epcd/www/naics.html. The NAICS code for the oil & natural gas exploration industry is 211111.

We will look up employment figures for San Juan County and for the New Mexico as a whole.

San Juan County, NM	2003	1998
Employment in NAICS 211111	200	200
Employment in ALL industries	33,996	31,938
Number of establishments	27	26

Also necessary is the same information for the U.S. as a whole, which can be obtained from the same web site. Select United States from the pull-down menu.

United States	2003	1998
Employment in NAICS 211111	70,534	86,117
Employment in ALL industries	113,398,043	108,117,731
Number of establishments	6,968	7,432

Once we have all this information, we will calculate location quotients for both of the selected years. “The location quotient (LQ) is an index for comparing an area's share of a particular activity with the area's share of some basic or aggregate phenomenon.” (http://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/faculty/fstutz/locationquot.html). For each of the years, we will use the following formula:

(Number of San Juan County jobs in oil & natural gas extraction) / (Total number of San Juan County jobs in all industries) = A

(Number of U.S. jobs in oil & natural gas extraction) / (Total number of U.S. jobs in all industries) = B

A/B

Calculate this formula for 2003 and for 1998

2003
(200 / 33,996) / (70,534 / 113,398,043) = 9.46

1998
(200 / 31,938) / (86,117 / 108,117,731) = 7.86

9.46 – 7.86 = 1.6

1.6 / 7.86 x 100 = 20.4% increase from 1998 to 2003