An Introduction to West Virginia Political Economy
The charts and remarks below consitute an exploration into West Virginia public and private material, service and farm production, employment, workforce, compensation, surpluses, taxation and subsidies, population. These are the categories of the state's political economy, since it embraces the various public and private components that are used to structure and measure overall economic performance . These are also the categories, by industry, that the BEA uses to inform policy advice of legislators and other federal departmetns, as well as the banking and financial services consumers.
The data available from BEA (Bureau of Economic Analysis), ranges from 2017-2022.
GDP
West Virginia GDP -- What and how much do we produce?
The underlying story in this graph is twofold:
- a) the heavy concentration of West Virginia's gross product value in natural resources and energy -- two markets that were heavily impacted by the pandemic and associated supply-chain failures, as well as the sanctions against Russian oil in the wake of the Ukraine war, as well as overall impact of monopoly in passing on price increases in global markets to consumers.
- b) Overall real growth is very SLOW.
Real GDP by Industry
The values in this chart are billions of dollars. Both 'B' and 'G' in the graph notation stand for 'billion'. This graph focuses on the most recent available regional industrial data, 2022. This permits displaying the distribution of production values across industries, and, by inference, occupations. The latter calculation integrates data from both BEA (commerce dept) and BLS (Bureau of Labor Statistics) to arrive at the sector employment estimates. The values are in millions.
GDP per employee
Employment by Industry
Compare Operational Surplus to Compensation by Industry
