The US Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) recently released the 2022 Gross Domestic Product (GDP) figures for Milam County. This data lets us see how Milam County’s economy performed in 2022.
There are two ways to look at GDP — in current dollars or adjusted for inflation. We all know there has been a lot of inflation lately — ugh.
In current dollars, Milam County’s economy grew by 14%, led by the Mining, Finance and Construction sectors. All industrial sectors grew, so this is terrific news!
However, when adjusting to 2017 dollars, Milam County’s economic growth from 2021 to 2022 did not outpace inflation and contracted by 1.4%. That’s still not bad. To put this in perspective, the Texas economy is booming and its economic growth from 2021 to 2022 (in 2017 adjusted numbers) was 2.7%. In current dollars, the Texas economy grew by 15%. From this perspective, Milam County’s economy kept pace with the state.
Further, Milam County’s private sector, which is where wealth is created, became a slightly larger piece of the economy at 87%; the public sector makes up the rest.
What does this mean? Milam County’s economy is a typical rural economy, based on agriculture, mining and the service industry. We should soon see rapid growth in the construction sector with the new subdivision and work at Sandow Lakes Ranch. With new industrial development in the area, we should also see the manufacturing and transportation sectors really grow. With that, we should then see other economic metrics, like education, personal income and poverty, start to improve.
Finally, if you look carefully at the chart, you can see that the 800,000 figure is important. First, that was the size of the Milam County economy in 2001, when the data starts. For 15 years in the data set (from 2003 to 2018), Milam County’s GDP figures were above this line. From 2018 to 2021, GDP was below this line.
Milam County has now re-crossed that important threshold. The next milestone will be to have an economy larger than when Alcoa and Luminant were operating.
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