Another conceptual origin of metropolitan areas lies not in the labor market, but in the relationships among firms in related industries. These transactions are less frequent, so they can occur over greater distances. In New Economy terms, it seems clear that the primary metropolitan areas of San Francisco, Oakland, and San Jose should be combined. The same goes for Denver and Boulder, Dallas and Fort Worth, Chicago and Gary. CMSAs can be quite extensive and include a number of cities that are not named.
Indicator measures the export orientation of manufacturing.
Economic dynamism and competition . The transformation to a digital economy . In all cases, the report relies on the most recently published statistics available, but because of the delays in publishing statistics, particularly federal, the data may in some cases be several years old. For some indicators, data were missing or incomplete for a few metropolitan areas. In these cases, we used a number of different measures to estimate the scores and we indicate where this has been done by asterisks next to the indicator on the two large summary tables.