CHARLOTTE, N.C. — Charlotte's economic growth often garners an abundance of attention for its fast pace, but it's another, albeit smaller, city in the metro area that ranked among the top 20 fastest-growing economies in the U.S.
Concord ranked at No. 16 in a new study by personal finance website WalletHub that analyzed 515 cities with varying populations to find where the fastest local economic growth has occurred in the nation. To do so, WalletHub used 17 key measures of both growth and decline over the past seven years and assigned cities an overall score on a 100-point scale. Those metrics, which ranged from population and job growth to unemployment rate decrease to regional GDP growth per capita, were grouped into two categories that carried equal weight in the ranking: sociodemographics and jobs and economy.
The study stuck strictly to cities, rather than metropolitan areas. WalletHub used data for the ranking from several sources, including the U.S. Census Bureau, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Bureau of Economic Analysis, the National Venture Capital Association and Renwood RealtyTrac.
