This Is The Most Productive State In America

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published May 30, 7:59AM EDT

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This Is The Most Productive State In America — © okimo / iStock via Getty Images

What is the best way to define productivity in a business or enterprise setting? How many cars does a plant put out in an hour? How many dollars worth of food get sold at a restaurant? Or even, what percent of students who graduate from high school go to college? The federal government has its own definition, and it recently assigned its yardstick to states.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics of the U.S. Department of Labor, the same agency that reports national unemployment numbers every month, recently released its PRODUCTIVITY BY STATE – 2020. Clearly, the number of hours worked by Americans dropped on average in 2020 because of the pandemic. Output decreased in all 50 states and the District in 2020 and hours worked decreased in all but one state which was Idaho, the BLS reported.

However, productivity is not defined based on that. The BLS defines it this way:

Labor productivity describes the relationship between real output and the labor hours involved in its production. These measures show the changes from period to period in the amount of goods and services produced per hour worked.

Based on this measure, Hawaii had the largest change in productivity between 2019 and 2020, up 8.5%. The productivity figure for non-farm payroll workers rose in 45 states and the District of Columbia. This was the best annual performance in productivity since 2010.

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Labor productivity rose by more than 5% in 10 states, including Hawaii. These were Nevada, up 8%, Alaska, up 6.3%, California, up 6.1%, District of Columbia, up 5.9%, Oregon, up 5.8%, Massachusetts, up 5.7%, Delaware, up 5.7%, New Jersey, up 5.4%, and New York, up 5.2%.

Productivity declined in five states. There were Idaho, down 2.7%, South Dakota, down 1.9%, Montana, down .7%, Tennessee, down 1.4%, and Oklahoma, down 1.4%.

Why the difference between state to state. The PRODUCTIVITY BY STATE – 2020 does not give any analysis or offer any explanation.

Click here to read This Is The Best Company to Work For In Every State

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.