About

The Economy in Place: Visualizing local economic conditions, policies, and the energy transition

About

Three dashboards of local data

The Economy in Place data visualization platform enables place-based practitioners, policymakers, journalists, and researchers to examine the evolving relationships between economic conditions, people, and places. It tracks conditions in 700+ commuting zones across the U.S., synthesizing a range of data into interactive dashboards. The platform paints detailed pictures of economic conditions and policy interventions within regions, equipping users with comprehensive, up-to-date data about these local labor markets. You can read more about the motivation behind the platform in our piece about why Place Matters.

The Economic Conditions dashboard provides data on economic indicators (joblessness, earning inequality, median wages, etc.).
The Policy Tracker dashboard provides data on various place-based transfers, classified under different domains – workforce development, local strategy and planning, business incentives, R&D – as well as individual means-tested transfers to enable comparisons.
The Energy Economy dashboard highlights the impacts of the green energy transition on local labor markets, and provides data on energy employment, earnings, and renewable potential .

The dashboards include decades of data, and will be updated as new data comes in.

Practical for place-based practitioners

The Place Profiles feature makes a range of data (demographic indicators, economic conditions, policy flows) available in an integrated manner at the commuting zone level. It also enables comparisons with neighboring and similar regions.

Building a body of knowledge

Distilling insights, trends, and narratives from the data: The platform includes a blog with posts about basic concepts, national trends, and deep dives into specific places. The blog will be regularly updated by the Reimagining the Economy team as well as local practitioners writing about their regions.
A repository of research on place-based policies: The Bibliography serves as a database of this vast literature, which we have categorized into streams and themes. We also highlight Reimagining the Economy's research on place-based policies.

We Want to Hear From You

Reach out to us if you are a local practitioner looking for more bespoke data about your region. Or if you're a national policymaker trying to understand historical trends or differences between regions. Or if you're a journalist investigating the myriad stories beneath these data. We're happy to share your stories on our platform.

You can reach us by email at economyinplace@gmail.com.

Citation and Use

This is intended to be a freely available public resource, and we actively encourage its use. We request attribution to the Reimagining the Economy Project and the Economy in Place data visualization platform.

Recommended citation:

Reimagining the Economy, Harvard Kennedy School (2025). Economy in Place. economyinplace.com

Who We Are

Economy in Place is an initiative of the Reimagining the Economy Project at the Harvard Kennedy School.

Reimagining the Economy is an economics-centered, but multidisciplinary initiative, working at the intersection of research and practice. We use the theoretical and empirical tools of economics, but are also informed and enriched by the thinking in other disciplines and the experiences of practitioners. Our ultimate goal is to go beyond the analysis of how our current economy works (or doesn’t) to piece together new structures, governance mechanisms, and forms of market economy and capitalism. Our focus areas include Place Based Policy, Productive Development Policies, the Green Energy Transition, and the Institutions and Governance undergirding all of these policies.