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*See also: [[UVM Cancer Center]] ==Ranking Vermont's VC== I pulled data from the [[US Startup City Ranking]] project, which also provides state rankings, and draws data from [[VCDB20]] to make some graphs showing Vermont's VC over time. Vermont's VC is so small that it is dwarfed by year-to-year national variation, which is one or two orders of magnitude larger. So, as much as we might want Vermont to be something, it is currently very much a rounding error. Its state rank has mostly oscillated between 35 and 40. Its current contemporary states include Alabama, Louisianna, Montana, and Idaho, none of which can be considered successful for their entrepreneurship. Its five-year moving average rank suggests that Vermont's most recent peak was 10 years ago.[[File:VermontPercentOFUSTotal1980to2020.PNG |left|500px]] [[File:VermontVCRanking1980to2020.png|right|500px]]
Vermont Science and Technology Plan (view source)
Revision as of 13:29, 18 March 2023
, 13:29, 18 March 2023no edit summary
==Summary==
On Friday, April 8th 2022, two UVM faculty members administrators presented a draft of the 2022 Vermont Science and Technology Plan on behalf of the Vermont Technology Council, which is currently chaired by David Bradbury, founder of VCET.
Useful links:
On Thursday, April 14th, I returned to the public comment form to find it closed.
The [https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5e7a76064770eb76b4ad8456/t/62ab3b1198dec56871f83b2e/1655388953179/68160_VTEpscor+Final_WEB_6.15.pdf Final report] was released in May 2022 and endorsed by Secretary of ACCD Lindsay Kurrle.
==Census Data==
jumped by 3% to 12% over this 10-year period
The source of the data for these claims and Figure 1 is "JobsEQ": https://www.chmura.com/software. The figure shows an annual average growth rate of technology firms of 5% (compounding to 60% over ten years), which is strong, particularly for a state like Vermont, but not impossible. The scaling of the axis makes it look more dramatic. I originally thought that this was "not impossible" (though obviously very suspicious) based on state-level growth rates for venture-backed startups. However, the 'Relative Growth' analysis below clarifies that this is well outside the bounds of possibility at the state level for the technology sector as a whole for any prolonged period. It also confirms the stylized fact that the number of technology firms declined for the US as a whole over this period.
The Business Dynamics Statistics data from the U.S. Census is the standard data source for entry and exit and is available at the state-NAICS2 level from 1978 to 2019 (an update is due). There are numerous well-documented issues with using BDS, including that it measures establishments, not firms, and that the Census restricts access to sparse data. See the [[American Community Survey (ACS) Data]] page for related information.
* The JobsEQ data has unknown providence and sampling criteria. It shows the number of technology firms at around the same level as the Census data in 2010 but then JobsEQ data shows dramatic growth while the Census data shows a material contraction. The most likely explanation is that the JobsEQ data is not correctly recording establishment exits.
* The Vermont Center for Emerging Technologies (VCET) was founded in 2005, before the major collapse of Vermont's technology sector between 2006 and 2010.
==== Relative Growth ====
[[File:RelativeTechnologyEmployment_Vermont.PNG|right|500px]] It is interesting to look at Vermont's relative growth in technology establishments and employment:
* The data was retrieved in bulk from https://www.census.gov/data/datasets/time-series/econ/bds/bds-datasets.html and downloaded by sector and state from 1978 to 2020.
* State codes are available in https://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/bds/technical-documentation/label_state.csv
* Files are E:\projects\census\BDS Bulk Analysis
* SQL script is BulkAnalysis.sql
[[File:RelativeTechnologyEstablishments_Vermont.PNG|right|500px]] I processed the data so that each state's establishments and employment are relative to their year 2000 levels. The establishments' data makes it clear that the Vermont Science and Technology Plan's numbers are patently absurd. They show Vermont with a growth rate of 59% from 2010 to 2020, which is more than 2.6 times the fastest growth rate achieved by the fastest-growing state (Delaware) over the same period. Vermont's actual establishments' growth rate was -4% for this period (ranking 28th), which was below the median (-3%) and well below the mean (-2%). Vermont's technology sector employment trends are even worse. Technology sector employment in Vermont was more than a quarter lower in 2020 than it was in 2000, and Vermont's twenty-year growth rate ranks 44th.
The technology establishments and employment peaked for the entire US during the dot-com boom. Then they fell precipitously until around 2010 when they stabilized into a more gentle decline. Only three jurisdictions have grown more than 10% over the last decade - Washington D.C., Nevada, and Delaware. And America's three most productive states, California, Texas, and New York, which account for almost a third of American GDP and a quarter of its population, all experienced mild to moderate declines.
=== Example 2: Quantifying the Vermont Manufacturing Sector ===
* Non-UVM NIH grants experienced a boom from 2006 to 2016 but are now back to near-zero levels.
