{"slug":"state-economy-vs-formation","title":"Business formation against real economic growth, by state","unit":"percent change","generated_at":"2026-08-24T23:40:33+00:00","source":{"tier":"A","producer":"U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, Regional Economic Accounts (SAGDP9), with U.S. Census Bureau Business Formation Statistics","url":"https://apps.bea.gov/regional/","retrieved_at":"2026-08-24T23:40:33+00:00","license":"U.S. Government work, public domain"},"upstream":["BEA Regional SAGDP9 LineCode=1 GeoFips=STATE","BABATOTALNSAAL","BABATOTALNSAAK","BABATOTALNSAAZ","... see business-formation-by-state for the full list"],"transform":"Real GDP by state in millions of chained 2017 dollars, 2019 to 2025, expressed as percent change, joined by state to the trailing-twelve-month business application counts and seven-year application growth from the Observatory's business-formation-by-state dataset. Spearman rank correlation is reported because the application distribution has a single extreme value.","verification":{"ok":true,"checks":[{"name":"completeness","passed":true,"detail":"51 of 51 states matched to the formation dataset"},{"name":"real_vs_nominal","passed":true,"detail":"units 'Millions of chained 2017 dollars' are inflation-adjusted, so a 6-year comparison is real rather than a chart of prices"},{"name":"outlier_dependence","passed":true,"detail":"rho=+0.393; dropping Wyoming gives rho=+0.479"},{"name":"wyoming_double_extreme","passed":true,"detail":"Wyoming ranks 1 of 51 on application growth and 1 of 51 on slowest real GDP growth; the headline asserts both"},{"name":"same_window","passed":true,"detail":"real GDP 2019 to 2025; business applications measured against the same 2019 base in the formation dataset"}]},"meta":{"base_year":"2019","latest_year":"2025","unit":"Millions of chained 2017 dollars","spearman_apps_vs_gdp":0.393,"spearman_excluding_wyoming":0.479,"median_gdp_growth_top10_apps":18.5,"median_gdp_growth_bottom10_apps":7.7,"wyoming_gdp_growth_pct":3.7,"wyoming_application_growth_pct":346.4},"notes":["Real GDP is in chained 2017 dollars, so this is not a comparison of nominal values across a period of high inflation.","Association, not cause. States that grew faster had more people starting businesses and more businesses to start; nothing here identifies which way that runs, and a common driver such as population growth would produce the same picture.","Business applications are measured to July 2026 and real GDP to the latest published year, so the windows are close but not identical."],"row_count":51,"rows":[{"state":"WY","name":"Wyoming","real_gdp_musd":39990.5,"real_gdp_base_musd":38577.1,"real_gdp_growth_pct":3.7,"applications":85212,"application_growth_pct":346.4,"applications_per_1k":144.7,"high_propensity_share_pct":24.2,"formation_rate_pct":3},{"state":"NM","name":"New 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Attribute DFX Intelligence and link to the story."}