Economic Impact (2019-2021)

The growth of the region’s primary-sector companies often happens quietly and without much fanfare. It’s helpful to take a snapshot. The past three years reflects thousands of added jobs and hundreds of millions in capital investment.

Ripple Effect into Main Street

These economic impacts take the key metrics of a new project (capital spent, employees hired, etc.) and translates those metrics into ripple effects of jobs, employee compensation and sales in our region. This has allowed us to provide a dynamic picture of what effects primary-sector projects have in the short term with construction and capital spending and long term with on-going operations.

These effects are seen across all sectors in the FM MSA with new jobs, wage growth and increased sales to both main street and primary-sector businesses.

The data below is a result of our economic impact data modeling of the EDC’s successful projects in the primary sector. This economic activity spurred additional spending in main street sectors of local businesses. The numbers below represent the economic impact of main street sectors from successfully assisted GFMEDC projects from 2019-2021.

From 2019-2021, successfully assisted GFMEDC projects contributed nearly 2,000 new regional jobs. Ripple effects of those jobs created an additional 2000 jobs. For every job created by a successfully assisted EDC project, another job was created in our region. We can’t forget about the impact of new construction on our region; construction activities contributed on average 1,100 jobs each year.

These successful projects added jobs and also wages to our local economy. The GFMEDC’s assisted projects from 2019-2021 resulted in total employee compensation of $644M. New jobs that were created with these projects will continue to positively impact the region for years.

Average annual salary across all jobs including construction modeled to $58,207. On-going direct jobs added by companies successfully assisted by the EDC paid an average annual salary of $64,271 (does not include construction). Ripple effects of indirect and induced jobs paid an average annual salary of $54,877 (does not include construction).

Successfully assisted projects have spent dollars in our region to make their expansions happen. From 2019-2021, $1.02B in direct sales have been made to support project growth. An additional $843M in ripple effects and construction spending of $645M brings the total to $2.5B.

*Source for Impact Data: Bangsund, Dean A. 2019-2021. Analysis of Recent GFMEDC Business Expansions on FM Area Economy