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Residents
of
Brown
County
got some unexpected news from the Federal Government
recently. After sifting
through and analyzing the results of the 2000 Census, the Bureau of
Economic Analysis concluded that the economy of the county of rolling
hills and dazzling fall colors is fundamentally linked to the
skyscrapers and blacktop of the city of
Indianapolis
.
Thus
Brown
County
joins
Putnam
County
to the west as the two newest members of the Indianapolis Metropolitan
Statistical Area, or MSA, the state's largest.
That result is based on the commuting patterns and income flows
that were recorded in the detailed "long form" Census
responses.
Clearly,
it was a judgement call. In
the final analysis, the statisticians decided that the new residential
growth pushing into the north out of southern
Johnson
County
outweighed the county's long established connections to the west to
Bloomington
. Thus a patch of the
state's most beautiful real estate became part of its largest urban
area.
But plenty of other
Indiana
counties can
relate to its experience. With
the latest wave of reclassifications, exactly half of our state's 92
counties are now
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considered to be
part of an MSA.
Indianapolis
's expansion to
outlying counties was echoed in the Gary-Hammond,
Lafayette
,
Bloomington
,
Evansville
and Terre Haute MSA's.
Meanwhile, the brand new single
county
MSA
's of La
Porte/Michigan City and
Columbus
came into being.
Interestingly,
some counties went in the opposite direction.
Clinton
County
, east of
Lafayette
, is no longer part of that MSA, as are the once-included Huntington and Adams
counties in the
Fort Wayne
area. And
Anderson
, while still an MSA county, has reverted back to its status as a single-county
MSA, after spending a decade as part of
Indianapolis
.
Unfortunately,
the inconsistent nature of these revisions gives the whole classification
process a "game of chairs" flavor that belies the serious effort put
into the overall process. One is
tempted to say that the lines drawn on maps by statisticians in
Washington
are meaningless, but that is clearly not the case.
MSA
counties are treated differently in official statistics, which, in turn, are
the bread and butter for private sector market analysis.
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Tiny
Brown
County
may
practically disappear in the sprawling Indianapolis MSA, but its leaders
can point to timely data available on employment, retail sales and
income for MSA's and say that they are included.
And as they say in the legal profession, incomplete information
trumps no information every time.
But
the definitions are also valuable as an outside, independent assessment
of how our urban areas are growing.
Based on the best data available, the BEA tells us, for example,
that one really can't talk about
Putnam
County
's economic well being without taking into consideration the fortunes of
Indianapolis
. After all, 45 percent of
county workers there commute to jobs outside its borders, with the
majority heading east in the morning.
Some
of us, blinded by geographic loyalties borne out of high school
athletics or political patronage, might be surprised to find out how the
world outside our windows has changed.
Growth at the fringe of urban areas remains the big story in
economic and population growth, and the new MSA definitions bear that
out.
Patrick M. Barkey
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