Macro Indicators of Economic Data by ZIP Codes or Cities in the US

Question

I am looking for a tabular (preferably) dataset or a website's API that contains the economic data of zip codes, counties or cities in the US. This dataset has to go back at least to 2003 (it's not strictly required but being recent data is a must). I am interested in statistics like average income per citizen and metrics similar to Gross Domestic Product by city.

What I've tried so far

1. One source I could find was the 2007 economic census but it appears unavailable https://www.census.gov/econ/geo-county.html and unrelated. Plus according to the release schedule economic data by ZIP will be released in June 2016 https://www.census.gov/econ/census/schedule/

2. Following the answer to this question I explored the Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics (LEHD), Quarterly Workforce Indicators and they did include economic data at the micro scale, meaning Hires, Separations, employment counts etc. That is not really the macro metrics like average income or GDP I need.

3. And finally I looked at the County and Zip Code Business Patterns but that dataset only includes details about industries in those areas. Not really macro indicators either

Any additional source will be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

I can certainly help you with the income estimates. The Census Bureau publishes mean/average income at the ZCTA level. For cities and ZCTA's, the estimate come from a pooled 5-year sample that ranges from 2010-2014 back to 2005-2009.

You might only need the first table (S1901), but I figured posting the table giving information on the estimated aggregate sum of income would be good for info too:

S1901

INCOME IN THE PAST 12 MONTHS (IN 2014 INFLATION-ADJUSTED DOLLARS)

City, ZCTA

B19313

AGGREGATE INCOME IN THE PAST 12 MONTHS (IN 2014 INFLATION-ADJUSTED DOLLARS) City, ZCTA

Answer 2

Wolfram Mathematica comes with curated data build in. For this answer I'll restrict the data collection to only a couple of counties but it is easily expanded to more.

We will use the AdministrativeDivisionData function for reference and the "PerCapitaIncome" property. Expand the Details section to see the list of data points available from this function. There are also other functions like CityData, CountryData, and so on.

We will use the Entity methods for this type of grab.

First grab all the New York State counties and show the first 2.

nyCounties = 
  EntityList@
   Entity["AdministrativeDivision", 
    {EntityProperty["AdministrativeDivision", "ParentRegion"] -> 
      AdministrativeDivisionData[{"NewYork", "UnitedStates"}]}];
nyCounties[[1 ;; 2]]

Next define the property we want from the data.

pci = EntityProperty["AdministrativeDivision", "PerCapitaIncome",
  {"Date" -> Interval[{DateObject@{2002}, DateObject@{2015}}]}]

Call the data and show the first one.

pciEntityValues = EntityValue[
   nyCounties,
   pci,
   "EntityAssociation"
   ];

First@Normal@pciEntityValues

It seems that there is only data from 2009 to 2012 at the moment. You could raise a support ticket to find out if there is more.

Finally a basic plot of the first county's data.

DateListPlot[pciEntityValues[[1]],
 PlotLabel -> First@Keys@pciEntityValues,
 Joined -> False, Filling -> Axis]

The above only looks at New York State counties but you can alter this to get an EntityList for all the states or counties in the USA, or for other counties. Data will depend on availability when dealing with other countries. The European ones are generally good.

Hope this helps.