Douglas County’s Per Capita Personal Income Decreased in 2022
December 27, 2023The U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of Economic Analysis recently released its 2022 estimates of personal income for substate areas (counties and townships).
Personal income includes all forms of income including earnings by place of work, dividends, interest and rent, and government transfer payments (largely Social Security and Medicare). Total personal income is then divided by population to create per capita personal income (PCPI).
PCPI is one of the most commonly used measures to gauge an area’s relative economic wellbeing, but there are limitations. For instance, since it includes the entire population, areas with a high concentration of children or students can skew the results lower since there is a large portion of the population with little or no income. Conversely, areas with an older population likely have a high proportion of retired people who may have a high level of wealth but lower relative incomes. Finally, it does not account for an area’s cost of living. People in areas with a low cost of living can live comfortably on less per capita income. That being said, let’s take a look at Douglas County’s PCPI.
Douglas County’s 2022 PCPI decreased $903 (-1.8%) to reach $49,440. In comparison, Oregon’s PCPI increased $675 (1.1%) to reach $62,303. For the U.S., PCPI increased $1,040 (1.6%) to reach $65,470. Prior to the loss in 2022 Douglas County’s PCPI increased $452 in 2020 and $504 in 2021.
Douglas County’s total personal income dropped by approximately $89 million in 2022 to reach $5.6 billion, a 1.6%% decrease over 2021. The decrease in 2022 follows an increase of roughly $504 million (9.8%) in 2021.
The components of personal income for Douglas County show that 46% is from earnings; 19% is from dividends, interest, and rent; and 36% is from transfer payments mostly in the form of Social Security and Medicare. Douglas County has a high portion of personal income from transfer payments compared with the U.S. and Oregon, which are 18% and 21%, respectively – an indication of a relatively large retirement age population.
Relative to other areas, Douglas County’s per capita personal income dropped to 79% of the statewide and to 76% of the U.S. figures. Douglas County’s 2022 per capita personal income ranks 28th among Oregon’s 36 counties.
More information is available at the Bureau of Economic Analysis website at www.bea.gov.