Money

Interactive: U.S. Counties by Household Income

Published

1 year ago

August 30, 2018

Jeff Desjardins

What U.S. counties have the largest household incomes?

Interactive: U.S. Counties by Household Income

With over 3,000 counties in the United States, variance is to be expected.

Geographically speaking, for example, there a wide spectrum of differences between counties. Some are situated in gorgeous mountain settings, while others may be almost entirely flat. There are urban counties that are major population centers, and others that don’t have a skyscraper within 500 miles of them.

Just like with geography, individual counties can also be quite unique when it comes to looking at socioeconomic measurements, such as median household income.

Median Income by County

Today’s interactive infographic comes to us from Overflow Data, and it helps give a sense of the household income spectrum by visualizing data from all U.S. counties.

Some counties, like Loudoun County (Virginia) have sky-high median incomes – in this case, $125,672 per household.

Meanwhile, other places are stuck in much rougher circumstances. For example, just a few hundred miles away is McDowell County (West Virginia), which has a median household income of $25,206.

Highs and Lows

The level of wealth found in a particular county is dependent on a large quantity of factors, including nearby industries, natural resources, demographics, tax rates, education, and available jobs and careers.

As you can see on the map, the most common range for median household income is from $45,000 to $70,000. Simultaneously, however, there are outliers that fall way outside that range for various reasons.

Highest Median Incomes

Here are the five counties with the highest median household incomes in the U.S.:

Rank	County	Median household income	Population
#1	Loudoun, Virginia	$125,672	362,435
#2	Fairfax, Virginia	$114,329	1,132,887
#3	Howard, Maryland	$113,800	308,447
#4	Arlington, Virginia	$108,706	226,092
#5	Hunterdon, NJ	$108,177	125,708

Not surprisingly, four of these five counties are clustered around Washington, D.C., and the other is just over an hour away from Manhattan.

Lowest Median Incomes

Finally, here are the five counties with the lowest median incomes in the country:

Rank	County	Median household income	Population
#1	McCreary, Kentucky	$18,972	17,850
#2	Sumter, Alabama	$20,428	13,285
#3	Holmes, Mississippi	$20,800	18,547
#4	Stewart, Georgia	$20,882	5,791
#5	Lee, Kentucky	$21,185	6,896

All of these are located in the Southeast, although just missing the top five was Mora County in New Mexico ($21,190). As you can see by the population numbers, these are all very rural places as well.

Want to see more on median household income? See it visualized at the state level.

Up Next

World’s Ultra-Wealthy Population, in One Chart

Don't Miss

California Cannabis: A Golden Opportunity With Unique Challenges

Comments

Markets

The Dominance of U.S. Companies in Global Markets

U.S.-based companies have a heavy weighting in global equity markets. In most industries, their market capitalization exceeds 50% of the total.

Published

4 days ago

February 20, 2020

Jenna Ross

U.S. Companies Dominate Global Markets

Are global indexes as “global” as you think they are?

With the aim of tracking market performance around the world, these indexes incorporate securities from various regions. However, while the number of securities may be relatively well diversified across countries, a dollar perspective tells a different story. When market capitalization is taken into account, country weightings may become much more unbalanced.

Today’s visualization is based on a concept by S&P Dow Jones Indices that shows the percentage of U.S.-based companies in global sectors and industries as of December 31, 2019. The calculations reflect the market capitalization of companies in the S&P Global Broad Market Index (BMI), an index that tracks over 11,000 stocks across 50 developed and emerging economies.

Percentage of U.S. Companies by Sector

U.S-based companies—those that maintain their primary business affairs in the U.S.—are a major component of many global sectors and industries.

Here’s how it breaks down:

Sector	% of U.S.-based Companies	Most U.S.-heavy Subsector
Information technology	73%	Software (86%)
Health care	65%	Health care providers (82%)
Utilities	53%	Electric utilities (57%)
Real estate	51%	Equity REITs (69%)
Consumer discretionary	49%	Specialty retail (73%)
Consumer staples	46%	Household products (74%)
Industrials	46%	Aerospace & defense (73%)
Energy	44%	Energy - other (73%)
Financials	44%	Financials - other (73%)
Materials	30%	Chemicals (41%)

U.S.-based companies make up a staggering 73% of the information technology (IT) sector. However, China may soon threaten this dominance. The Made in China 2025 plan highlights new-generation IT as a priority sector for the country.

The U.S. is still the world’s leader, but China is coming up very fast.

—Rebecca Fannin, Journalist & Author of Tech Titans of China

Healthcare is also heavily skewed towards U.S-based stocks, which make up 65% of the sector’s market capitalization. This weighting is perhaps not surprising given the success of many U.S. healthcare companies. In Fortune’s list of the 500 most profitable U.S. companies, 41 healthcare organizations made the cut.

The materials sector has the smallest weighting of U.S.-based stocks, but they still account for almost one-third of the overall market capitalization. Three American companies are in the sector’s top 10 holdings: Air Products & Chemicals, Ecolab, and Sherwin-Williams.

U.S. Equity Views in a Global Context

Given the high weighting of U.S. stocks in global sectors and industries, having a U.S. view is important. This refers to investors gaining a clear perspective on the risks and opportunities that exist in the country. Investors can consider the trends influencing American companies in order to help explain stock performance.

U.S. stock dominance also impacts geographic diversification. While it helps non-U.S. investors overcome their home bias, American investors may want to consider targeting specific international markets for well-rounded exposure.

Demographics

Mapped: The Ins and Outs of Remittance Flows

Every year, migrant workers send billions of dollars back to their home countries—reaching $550 billion in 2019. Where do these remittance flows wind up?

Published

2 weeks ago

February 12, 2020

Iman Ghosh

Mapped: The Ins and Outs of Remittance Flows

The global immigrant population is growing at a robust pace, and their aggregate force is one to be reckoned with. In 2019, migrants collectively sent $550.5 billion in money back to their home countries—money transfer flows that are also known as remittances.

Remittances serve as an economic lifeline around the world, particularly for low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). Today’s visualization relies on the latest data from the World Bank to create a snapshot of these global remittance flows.

Where do most of these remittances come from, and which countries are the biggest recipients?

Remittances: An Origin Story

Remittances are a type of capital flow, with significant impacts on the places they wind up. These money transfers have surpassed official aid being sent to LMICs for decades, and in this day and age, are rivaling even Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) flows.

Remittance flows mainly help improve basic living standards such as housing, healthcare, and education, with leftover funds going towards other parts of the economy. They can also be a means for increasing the social mobility of family and friends back home.

Altogether, 50% of remittances are sent in either U.S. dollars, or the closely-linked currencies of Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries, such as the Saudi riyal. It’s not surprising then, that the U.S. is the biggest origin country of remittances, contributing $68.5 billion in 2018—more than double that of the next-highest country, Saudi Arabia, at $33.6 billion.

Remittance Flows As A Safety Net

The impact of remittances on LMICs can vary depending on what you measure. In absolute terms, the top 10 LMIC recipients received $350 billion, or nearly 64% of total remittances in 2019.

Top Remittance Recipients in 2019 (USD)

Rank	Country	Remittance Inflows	% of Nominal GDP
#1	🇮🇳 India	$82.2B	2.8%
#2	🇨🇳 China	$70.3B	0.5%
#3	🇲🇽 Mexico	$38.7B	3.1%
#4	🇵🇭 Philippines	$35.1B	9.8%
#5	🇪🇬 Egypt	$26.4B	8.8%
#6	🇳🇬 Nigeria	$25.4B	5.7%
#7	🇵🇰 Pakistan	$21.9B	7.9%
#8	🇧🇩 Bangladesh	$17.5B	5.5%
#9	🇻🇳 Vietnam	$16.7B	6.4%
#10	🇺🇦 Ukraine	$15.9B	11.8%

India tops the chart as the largest remittances beneficiary, followed by China and Mexico. Interestingly, these three countries are also the main destinations of remittance flows from the U.S., but in the reverse order. Mexico and the U.S. have one of the most interconnected remittance corridors in the world.

However, the chart above makes it clear that simply counting the dollars is only one part of the picture. Despite these multi-billion dollar numbers, remittances are equal to only a fraction of these economies.

By looking at remittances as a percentage of nominal GDP, it’s clear that they can have an outsize impact on nations, even if the overall value of flows are much lower in comparison.

Top Remittance Recipients in 2019 (% of GDP)

Rank	Country	Remittance Inflows	% of Nominal GDP
#1	🇹🇴 Tonga	$0.19B	38.5%
#2	🇭🇹 Haiti	$3.3B	34.3%
#3	🇳🇵 Nepal	$8.6B	29.9%
#4	🇹🇯 Tajikistan	$2.3B	29.7%
#5	🇰🇬 Kyrgyz Republic	$2.4B	29.6%
#6	🇭🇳 Honduras	$5.3B	21.4%
#7	🇸🇻 El Salvador	$5.6B	20.8%
#8	🇰🇲 Comoros	$0.14B	19.3%
#9	🇼🇸 Samoa	$0.17B	18.4%
#10	🇵🇸 West Bank and Gaza	$2.6B	17.6%

It’s clear that the cash influxes provided by remittances are crucial to many smaller countries. Take the Polynesian archipelago of Tonga, for example: even though it only saw $190 million in remittances from abroad, that amount accounts for nearly 40% of the country’s nominal GDP.

Will The Remittance Tides Turn?

The World Bank projects remittance flows to increase to nearly $600 billion by 2021. But are such projections of future remittance flows reliable? The researchers offer two reasons why remittances may ebb and flow.

On one hand, anti-immigration sentiment across major economies could complicate this growth, as evidenced by Brexit. The good news? That doesn’t stop immigration itself from taking place. Instead, where these migrants and their money end up, are constantly in flux.

This means that as immigration steadily grows, so will remittance flows. What’s more, fintech innovations have the potential to bolster this progress, by making money transfers cheaper and easier to access.