Stories of Technology, Innovation, & Entrepreneurship in the Southeast

A new report from the Economic Innovation Group notes that “left-behind counties” in the United States have just experienced their strongest three-year period of job creation and business growth since the turn of the 21st century. Despite their vigorous recovery in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, the economic gap between these counties and the rest of the country nonetheless continues to widen.

Representing more than 1,000 counties and inhabited by 18 percent of the country’s population, these left-behind communities are defined by lagging population and income growth from 2000 to 2016. Between 2016 and 2019, annual job growth in these counties averaged only 0.4 percent, less than one-third of the national rate. By the start of 2020, fewer than one-third had recovered all the jobs they lost during the Great Recession, which ended more than a decade earlier.

Then, the trend was reversed. Between 2020 and 2023, jobs in left-behind counties grew more than four times faster than in the four previous years — and nearly half of these counties have already regained all the jobs they shed during the COVID downturn.

Tennessee ranks #10 in the nation in terms of left-behind counties, and the total population in those communities is 1,777,182 citizens.

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