Borrowing from an approach that sometimes appears in the finance sections of the popular press, LSGL analysis is a handy and versatile way to compare, portray and classify the patterns of employment growth across all of Tennessee's 95 counties. In finance, this technique is used for comparing and assessing the market performance of individual securities or across industry sectors. For example, the performance of the 30 stocks contained within Dow are compared with one another over the past week in contrast to their performance over the past month using the Dow's respective averages as the points of reference.

Here in this Tennessee Regional Economic Analysis Project report, we adopt this approach to gauge and compare the employment growth of Tennessee's 95 counties over the latest available year (2022) against the backdrop of their growth over the long term period (2018-2022). In so doing we classify their growth and performance into 4 broad categories: Leading, Slipping, Gaining and Lagging.

This figure displays the 95 counties of Tennessee as dots on a scattergram, with the vertical axis representing the average annual employment growth rate over the long-term period (2018-2022), and the horizontal axis representing the employment growth rate for the near-term (2022).

This figure sets apart those counties whose long-term employment growth exceeded the statewide average of 2.27%, by portraying them in the top two quadrants demarcated at 2.27% on the vertical axis. County whose long-term average annual employment growth rate trailed the statewide average (2.27%) are distributed in the bottom two quadrants. In all, 0 counties surpassed the statewide average over 2018-2022, while 0 counties fell below.

Similarly, the two quadrants on the right of this figure present the positions of the 0 counties whose most recent (2022) employment growth rate exceeded the statewide average (4.76%). The two quadrants on the left feature those 0 counties whose employment growth over 2022 trailed the statewide average.

Accordingly, each quadrant portrays the performance of all 95 counties corresponding with their long-term (2018-2022) and near-term (2022) performance relative to their respective statewide averages of 2.27% over 2018-2022 and 4.76% over 2022:

Leading counties () (top-right quadrant)...are the nineteen counties whose average annual employment growth rate surpassed the statewide average both long-term (2.27%) and near-term (4.76%).

Slipping counties () (top-left quadrant)...are the thirteen counties whose long-term average annual employment growth rate exceeded the statewide average (2.27%), but whose near-term growth has "slipped" by falling below the Tennessee average (4.76%).

Gaining counties () (bottom-right quadrant)...are the nine counties whose long-term average annual employment growth rate fell below the statewide average (2.27%), but whose near-term growth has "gained" by registering above the average (4.76%) statewide.

Lagging counties () (bottom-left quadrant)...are the fifty-four counties whose average annual employment growth rate fell under the statewide average both long-term (2.27%) and near-term (4.76%).