U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics

The Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes the employment, wage, and industry series that a local economic measure can be built from without collecting anything locally.

Where it is used here

Measuring local economic resilience uses labor series alongside Census material to test whether a reduced indicator set can track richer resilience indices. Employment concentration by industry is the part of that work most dependent on this source.

Why it suits the question

The series are published on a regular schedule with consistent industry classifications, which is what makes a change over time interpretable. A measure that has to be recomputed differently each year is not a measure a small authority can maintain.

The limit that has to be carried

Employment counted where a job is located is not the same as employment held by residents, and industry classifications are revised. Comparing across a revision without saying so produces a change that is an artifact of the coding rather than of the economy.