For economic development authorities

Siting, incentive, and marketing decisions run on GDP contribution and payroll counts — measures of where work is booked, not what the place owns, owes, or could support.

Your job is to make a case for a place — to a site-selector, a relocating employer, a state legislature deciding where incentive dollars go. The case you are handed to make it with is a production number: GDP contribution, payroll, jobs created per dollar of abatement. All of it measures where work gets booked. None of it measures what the place actually holds.

That gap costs you the argument you actually want to win. A production metric can’t tell a site-selector whether a county has the housing stock, the household balance sheets, or the civic infrastructure to absorb a new employer — only whether other employers have already booked activity there. Two counties with identical GDP-per-capita can have opposite capacity to support growth, and the number you’re marketing with can’t see the difference. Worse, GDP is booked where work happens, not where people live, so a bedroom county doing the actual absorbing gets none of the credit in the figure you’d cite.

FAND builds the ledger a production number can’t: what a place owns, what it owes, and the trust infrastructure in between, using the same balance-sheet identity that runs for 200+ of the 237 economies and extends down through states to counties. The figures at the subnational scale are provisional and say so on their face — every number carries an honesty badge, and the watermark travels with every export. That is a feature for your use case, not a caveat: a labeled draft you can hand a prospect is worth more than a confident GDP figure that answers the wrong question.

Start with the shape of one: Duval County, Florida — a labelled sample panel showing how a county ledger is assembled, with its provenance on every row. Then find the geography you market in the Where-Tree. Then read the finding that should change how you pitch capacity in the first place — it isn’t how much activity a place already has, it’s how much more it could support.