By Rick Liu, Senior Economic Advisor As I’ve huddled in the house the past few days as infection levels continue to rise (well, that and 5 straight days of a 100+ degree heat index, mind you), I’ve been thinking about what happened 18 months ago when we hit an intense albeit brief economic downturn. Like …
Please consider this your refrigerator magnet, t-shirt, or tchotchke from my summer up in Maine. It’s a top ten of sorts, though it is grouped by subject than in order of importance… INCOME AND PRODUCTION MO CO PERSONAL INCOME COMES LESS FROM WAGES AND SALARIES THAN YOU THINK Wage and salary income is 43.0% of …
TEN THINGS I KNOW ABOUT THE MO CO ECONOMY (AND YOU SHOULD TOO!) Read More »
This week, we peek behind the curtain to see what we can learn from modeling Mo Co’s 2020 GDP. We find that 2020 GDP is down at least 0.8% to $94.8 billion, meaning that Mo Co will have fared somewhat better than the nation as a whole or Maryland. We also take a look at …
In this latest installment of Mo Co Economy Watch we take a hint from surging infection levels and pause to re-assess the economic risk associated with COVID-19 for Montgomery County and the region. DÉJÀ VU ALL OVER AGAIN? Recent news about COVID-19 variants, surging infection rates, breakthrough infections, and the unknowns & geopolitics of “booster …
This week it is a grab bag of key trends/issues in the Montgomery County and regional office market. We touch on regional competition from our Maryland neighbors, leasing activity, work from home, bioscience, and a partridge in a pear tree. MORE COMPETITION FROM PRINCE GEORGE’S AND FREDERICK COUNTIES Let us start by acknowledging a …
By Rick Liu, Senior Economic Advisor During the pandemic, after countless frozen Zoom meetings from poor internet speeds, I’ve been thinking on and off about data centers and what, if any, opportunity they could provide for Montgomery County. But when Frederick County made waves two week ago by announcing a $100 million, enterprise level data …
Lease data shows that big tech has an increasingly large footprint in the region We recently noted Montgomery County’s challenges in the attracting and retaining employers in industries that generally pay high wages. And we already know that those investments have enabled some jurisdictions in the region to reduce property tax rates (*gasp*). One topic …
BIG TECH IS SHOWERING THE REGION WITH INVESTMENT…MIRACULOUSLY, MO CO REMAINS DRY Read More »
In this latest installment of Mo Co Economy Watch, I address some odds and ends: ranking the retail submarkets; estimating the share of the daytime population that can work from home; and looking back at WARN notices during the COVID-19 recession. Retail submarket rankings We wrote recently about Montgomery County’s current/recent struggles to generate retail …
In this week’s MoCo Economy Watch blogpost, we take a dive into… shopping!? Well, Retail anyway. More precisely, how the County’s retail is connected to state & local revenue and our economic development aspirations. A premature obituary for brick-and-mortar retail It seems like every week or two there is a new article being written about …
In this third MoCo Economy Watch blogpost, we check in on some new employment numbers. What we find is that in early 2021 the number of unemployed County residents did not change much, but labor force participation increased. Both of these ran counter to the statewide trends during the same time period, which featured falling …
NEW EMPLOYMENT DATA RELEASES PAINT A MIXED PICTURE OF MOCO’S RECOVERY Read More »
