Welcome to the Southern Rural Development Center's (SRDC) Southern Region Information Toolkit website. We know how difficult it can be at times to get ready access to quality data on your area, or to find the right mix of information that can paint a clear and informative picture of how your area is doing over time. The SRDC , working in partnership with the Mississippi State University Extension Service and the Delta Data Center, has assembled the type of information that we believe responds to the data needs of organizations and agencies located at the local, state and Southern regional levels.

The Toolkit provides ready access to a variety of economic, demographic, and social indicators that citizens, local leaders, and organizations are likely to find quite valuable as they work to better understand and respond to important shifts taking place in their area.

Below are some important features of the Southern Region Information Toolkit website:

Types of Data Available in the Toolkit:

• Profiles of important population, education and economic indicators (Tool 1);
• Historical trends that help you determine the nature and direction of changes that have taken place in these measures over time (Tool 2);
• Location Quotients that provide an easy method for determining how closely a county's economy mirrors the structure of the national economy (Tool 3);
• Shift-Share Analysis (Tool 4) that helps identify the degree to which changes in county job growth are due to these three factors:
  • growth realized as a result of expansion taking place in the national economy,
  • changes that are the product of how local industries are weighted toward industries that are growing faster or slower than the national average, and
  • local factors that make local businesses more or less competitive than the national average.

Geographic Areas Covered in the Toolkit:

A key strength of the Toolkit is that data are available on a variety of geographic levels, a feature that helps maximize the usefulness of the data to a diversity of users. In particular, the Southern Region Information Toolkit offers individuals the flexibility to examine available data on a following geographic levels:

• County (county level data for all counties in the SRDC states);
• State (state level data for the states that constitute the SRDC Region);
• Region (regions are collections of counties from one or more states):
  • Appalachia Region,
  • Southern Appalachia Region,
  • Delta Region,
  • Mid South Delta Region,
  • Mississippi Delta Region,
  • Southern States Region;
• Nation (the United States as a whole).

Data by Metropolitan/Nonmetropolitan Status (Rurality) are Also Available:

If you are interested in exploring data by the metro or nonmetro status of counties, the Toolkit offers you the flexibility to do so. In particular, the new Office of Management and Budget's three-prong classification of counties (which they refer to as Rurality) is available at the state, regional and national levels. Information is provided for the following three county designations (click here for their definitions):

• Metropolitan;
• Micropolitan;
• Non-Metro-Non-Core.

Questions or Concerns?

Please feel free to contact the Southern Rural Development Center if you have any inquiries or if would like to offer any reactions to the Toolkit. Please note that new data will be added in the future that will further expand the value of the Southern Region Information Toolkit. So, we encourage you to keep visiting the Toolkit website to learn of new data that may have been added.

Using this Web Site

Gaining access to the data begins with the selection of the geographic area that you want to study. For example if you are interested in county-level data, you will have to first select the County option and then press the Select this Level button. You will then be prompted to identify the state which contains the county you are interested in studying. Once you select the state, press the Select This State button. The next page will require you to specify the county in that state. The toolbox will then walk you through a series of pages of data results for your chosen county. Always press the Next link at page bottom if you want to move to the next page. A Table of Contents selection box allows you to select any page and then press the Go. button to go there.

In order to make the county data even more meaningful, you will have the option to select another geographic area that can be used for a comparison. The comparison site can be another county, the state, the Southern region, or the nation.

Note that to use Tools 3 and 4 (Location Quotients and Shift-Share Analysis) you must select the County Geographic level since these tools are based on the comparison of county data to national data.