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IntroductionThe Evansville Factbook 2000-2001 is published by the USI School of Business primarily to foster economic development in Evansville and the Tri-State. The School's long term goals include a commitment to be the premier institution for economic development of the local economy. In line with the School's mission, the goal behind the fact book project is to enhance the information base on the Tri-State economy by providing access to an one-stop, up-to-date, accurate, and comprehensive source of time-series and cross-section data on important social and economic variables. Potential beneficiaries include area economic development officials, consultants, existing and new businesses in Southwestern Indiana, researchers, students, politicians, and other interested citizens. With great pleasure, I would like to note that the feedback received from users of previous five editions has been encouraging and indicate that we have been largely successful in achieving this goal. The online edition of the fact book has many new features. For the first time, the entire fact book is available free of cost on the Internet at the USI School of Business homepage. One of the many benefits of the wonderful revolution in information technology that we are experiencing as we speak is that we are no longer constrained by space or pages. There are many other advantages from using the World Wide Web to present the Fact book. Most tables include details on the original source and live links that instantly take the researcher to most recent information that is available. This reduces the possibility that the researcher using the factbook will get data that is seriously out of date any point of time. Additionally, the tables are cross-listed so that one can go from one site to another where additional information on the relevant topic is available. We have put each table in both the HTML format from ease of viewing. Additionally, each page has the "download" button to allow the reader to transport the data immediately to a spreadsheet for additional manipulations. Even the best data sites (U.S. Census Bureau) do not allow this ease of use. In terms of coverage, we have included much new data not covered in the past editions. Most of the statistics included in the Factbook 2000-2001 are collected from secondary sources on the Internet. The Economic Development Information Network (EDIN) that we used in the past is no longer available in the same format. We have used its successor on the web is STATS INDIANA (http://www.stats.indiana.edu/) that we have used extensively in addition to the U.S. Census Bureau and the Indiana Commerce Department sources. Additionally, we have collected data from several primary sources including the Evansville Chamber of Commerce, Dress Regional Airport, SIGECO, the Evansville Metropolitan Building Commission, and other organizations and businesses in the city. The Evansville Factbook 2000-2001 is divided into several parts. The first part contains a descriptive and statistical profile of the City of Evansville. Also presented are time-series tables on various social, economic, and demographic variables. The second section broadens the coverage to the four-county region, Evansville Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA) which includes Posey, Vanderburgh and Warrick Counties of Indiana and Henderson County of Kentucky. Presented here is time-series information on employment, earnings, and bank deposits. If the reader is interested in any particular county, the place to start is the third section which focuses on individual Counties. Included here are detailed information on eleven counties in Southern Indiana located in the proximity of the City of Evansville-Davies, Dubois, Gibson, Knox, Martin, Perry, Pike, Posey, Spencer, Vanderburgh, and Warrick and constitute the greater Evansville economy (Economic Region Thirteen). Each county is covered with disaggregated time-series tables some of which are devoted to that county alone. Other tables have information on that county and the rest of the eleven counties. The last segment focuses on Region Thirteen as a block, by including cross-section and time-series data on the eleven Indiana counties that make up this regional economy. Our declared goal in the first (1992) edition was to update this publication on a regular basis, and eventually to make available in electronic form (diskette) all of the economic development statistics included in the hard copy of the Factbook. At the time this seemed a challenging goal. However, the progress in information technology has been so rapid that we were able to achieve the goal ahead of our timeline. The goal was realized with the 1994-1995 edition of the Factbook. With the help of Lotus 1-2-3, Microsoft Excel or other spreadsheet and statistical software, users could access the data to produce tables and charts, or to conduct more sophisticated statistical analyses. This edition takes another technological leap-by making the entire edition available online free of cost. I would like to thank Dean Philip Fisher for his continued support for this project. I would be remiss if I did not mention that a grant in 1992 from the Lilly Foundation of Indianapolis made the development and publication of the original edition of the Factbook possible. Special thanks to Wayne Kirk who collected most of the data from the Internet, and to Jenny Medcraft for putting the data on the Internet and designing the website. Finally, I would like to mention my debt to my family, Tasmina, Sadia, and Naeem for their support. Dr. Munir Quddus, Former Professor and Chair November 30,2000 |