Income – Proprietor Employment and Income
Non-farm proprietors’ income represents the portion of the total income earned from current production that is accounted for by unincorporated non-farm businesses in the United States. Data are from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA). According to the BEA, the measure is a particularly useful analytical indicator of the health of non-corporate businesses.
Source
Source Description
The Bureau of Economic Analysis is an agency of the Department of Commerce. BEA produces economic accounts statistics that enable government and business decision-makers, researchers, and the American public to follow and understand the performance of the Nation’s economy. To do this, BEA collects source data, conducts research and analysis, develops and implements estimation methodologies, and disseminates statistics to the public.
Methodology
This indicator reports information about proprietor employment (or self employment) and income by county. Average measures of income are calculated as the total proprietor income of an area divided by the estimated number of proprietors within the area. Percentages are calculated by dividing the estimated proprietor employment by the total employment in an area. Data are acquired from the US Bureau of Economic Analysis Regional Economic Accounts: Economic Profile (CA30).
Proprietor income is the current-production income (including income in kind) of sole proprietorships, partnerships, and tax-exempt cooperatives. Corporate directors’ fees are included in proprietors’ income. Proprietors’ income includes the interest income received by financial partnerships and the net rental real estate income of those partnerships primarily engaged in the real estate business.
Proprietor employment includes both nonfarm proprietors and farm proprietors. Nonfarm self-employment consist of the number of sole proprietorships and the number of individual business partners not assumed to be limited partners. Farm self-employment is defined as the number of non-corporate farm operators, consisting of sole proprietors and partners. A farm is defined as an establishment that produces, or normally would be expected to produce, at least $1,000 worth of farm products–crops and livestock–in a typical year. Because of the low cutoff point for this definition, the farm self-employment estimates are effectively on a full-time and part-time basis.