Legislation may cause data deficit for researchers, small businesses

"We will be in the dark without the data," said Goetz. "We won't know whether policy changes we implemented are effective or not, and that could end up costing us more than we were trying to save." UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. Small farms and businesses may be the unintended victims of legislation aimed at cutting the federal budget by eliminating certain sets of local and county-based economic data, according to a group of economists. "This local data is really what we use in our lab," said Stephan Goetz , professor of agricultural economics and regional economics , Penn State, and director of the Northeast Regional Center for Rural Development. "And, at the end of the day, we're using this information to try to understand how our world is changing." The researchers, who report their findings in Choices Magazine, said that sequestration and proposed legislation, such as the Census Reform Act of 2013, will cut the reporting of some types of local economic and sociological data. For example, the legislation could eliminate county personal income by industry and unemployment insurance data provided by the Bureau of Economic Analysis. Researchers use county per capita income by industry to measure how different sectors of a county are performing.