United States

Nearly all of the quantitative work here runs on statistics published for United States geographies. This node exists so that dependency is explicit rather than implied by the datasets.

Why the country is recorded as a place

The research on this site is not about the country in aggregate. It is about small places inside it, measured with instruments designed and funded nationally. That asymmetry is the subject of Measuring local economic resilience: national programs publish comparable data down to small geographies, and the places with the least analytic capacity depend on that data most.

What the national statistical system makes possible

Consistent definitions across jurisdictions, so two counties can be compared without either collecting anything itself. A small authority that could never fund a survey can still compute an indicator, which is the property the resilience work is built on.

What it does not make possible

Small-area estimates carry wide margins of error, and the smaller the place the wider they get. Comparisons between two small geographies are frequently within each other’s uncertainty, which is a limit on the question rather than a caveat to add at the end.