[This is one of a series presenting statistics about Cobb County, taken from publicly available data sources. Our aim is to use charts to make the data easy to understand].
Below is a graph of the number of private business establishments that were located in Cobb County, from January 1, 1990 to April 1, 2019, as estimated in the quarterly reports of the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
It was compiled into an interactive timeline by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis as part of its FRED program, which assembles time series data from 89 sources. You can run your mouse pointer across the timeline to see how many private establishments were in Cobb during any quarter.
According to the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis website:
An establishment is an economic unit, such as a factory, mine, store, or office that produces goods or services. It generally is at a single location and is engaged predominantly in one type of economic activity. Where a single location encompasses two or more distinct activities, these are treated as separate establishments, if separate payroll records are available, and the various activities are classified under different industry codes.
Any idea what that major drop is from Q42016 to Q12017? That seems like some type of anomaly in the data. Even in the Dot.com Bust and The Great Recession, there wasn’t a drop like that.
I’m in the process of checking that out. It does seemed misplaced given that most graphs show their dips in 2008 rather than 2017. I’ll post an update if I get anything definitive.