The same authors of the 2017 working paper, Randall Akee, Elton Mykerezi and Richard Todd, also published a follow up analysis of non-employer establishments on and off reservations in the same geographic areas used in their 2017 study. According to the analysis, there were 684,800 establishments within the 514 counties included, of which only 0.7 percent or 39,322 were actually located within the boundaries of one of the 277 reservations included. Across the industrial sectors, only the Mining/Quarrying/Extraction and Educational Services sectors had more establishments located on the reservation per capita than off. Receipts for the non-employer establishments located on the reservations totaled nearly $2.4 billion, representing 0.8 percent of total non-employer establishment receipts in the designated areas, slightly higher than the establishment ratio. Non-employer establishments on reservations averaged $60,313 in receipts per establishment. One year ago, one of the authors, Richard Todd, published a secondary analysis for the Center for Indian Country Development of one of the somewhat unexpected results of their 2017 and 2018 work, namely a finding of a higher average of jobs per capita on reservations than in surrounding counties. This would seem to contradict the known gaps between unemployment rates and incomes for AIAN versus the general populace. The 2019 paper, (2019-04) found that the higher overall averages found in the prior studies were due primarily to high employment rates at Indian casinos and in public administration for a relatively small number of very successful gaming tribes that skewed the overall results. The impact of gaming and public administration can be seen in part in the older studies by virtue of their much higher proportion of total employment on the reservation than off. Nearly all of the variation can be identified in the Arts/Entertainment/Recreation, Accommodation and Foodservice and Public Administration sectors. On the Public Administration side, part of the variation is attributable to the unique legal, governmental and economic environments of Indian tribes that focus most economic activity through tribal government channels. However, the magnitude can also be attributed to the impact of large casino resorts that provide more significant funding for governmental operations than available to tribes lacking facilities of comparable scale. The skewing of the overall averages was further confirmed by the significant difference in distribution of the jobs per capita figure between reservations and their neighboring counties. Basically, the distribution of jobs per capita for surrounding counties was tightly clustered between 0.4 and 1.2, with a strong peak around the overall average of roughly 0.6 jobs. While the curve was not precisely bell shaped, sporting a slightly elongated tail out as far as 2.5 to 3.0 jobs per capita, the tail was not significant enough to skew the average to a substantial degree.
∴ PROGNOSIS
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