As promised I'd like to jump back into the data I started two weeks ago with information about international dollars that come into the state of Kentucky based on investments in businesses both foreign and domestic.
I just had SO MUCH DATA from the ThinkKentucky.com site that I wanted to split it into two different blogs so I could really not overwhelm browsers (particularly on mobile) with a huge page-load. Really though, too much data ... what a problem to have! I think the big thing also is the diversity of the data and the number of dimensions/measures that I was able to play with really allowed for a lot of interesting viz out of what's in there.
Originally I planned to write up something about the proposed trade restrictions on Mexico and how that could affect the Kentucky economy but after hashing out the data I wasn't really pleased with how it read. I'm a proponent of the NAFTA and unfortunately putting the larger amount that Mexico would have had to spend made it appear that the economy would be that much richer if the border taxes were enabled as proposed. Realistically though you can see in news stories such as this one... the real result is that when the cost becomes to much to export to a particular place a country finds another venue.
On this first dash I wanted to point out something; you'll notice that in the graphs below the running sum of investments by US vs International groups is MUCH closer than the personnel hiring. This lead to the bubble graph at the top showing Starting vs Full Employment numbers sized by the amount per person spend on the facility. There really isn't a whole lot of interactivity to this graph beyond looking at the County selection to see how each county has been funded over time. When combined with the other dashboard from part 1 you can really begin to get a more full view of how each county in Kentucky is impacted by international dollars.
Who is providing the most job growth, for what places, and regarding what industries though? That's when I developed this next Dashboard to look at the ways the different countries funded different industries and with differing rates of job growth. All of the following bar charts just have to be moused-over to filter the other two charts further. As with the other chart you can choose to define it by county or even by particular year (though I feel adding both county/year tends to be a little too refining).
Lastly I have a little "story" I put together which has a breakdown of how much each City has had invested in it by US companies vs International companies... and while working on the Dashboard above I got thinking about distilleries and how many "Kentucky" distilleries were actually owned by a multi-national corporation. Mouse-Over the dots to uncover what Countries invest in your favorite drinks!
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| Four Roses funding is Japanese! |
I wanted to share all this out, like I mentioned previously, because a lot of people want to separate the United States from the rest of the world. This is just a sample of how complex international business is within the relatively small state of Kentucky. So when ideas like changing HUGE trade agreements comes around... please try to remember all you've learned looking through all this data! As always if you have any questions or concerns please post them in the comments below or give me a shout at @wjking0 on Twitter!
