Economy
Idaho Falls serves as a regional hub for health care, travel and business in eastern Idaho.
The community's economy was mostly agriculturally focused until the opening of the National Reactor Testing Station in the desert west of Idaho Falls in 1949. The city subsequently became largely dependent on high-income jobs from the Idaho National Laboratory (INL), known locally simply as "The Site." The laboratory made several cutbacks in 1993. Since then the town has added call centers, a growing retail, entertainment, and restaurant sector, and a regional medical center.
Idaho Falls was named by Business Week as one of the 2010 List of "Best Places to Raise Kids". In addition, Forbes.com selected Idaho Falls as one of the "2010 Best Small Places for Business & Careers". Also Money.CNN.com included Idaho Falls as one of their "Top 100 Cities in 2010".
Idaho Falls has become a regional business hub. It hosts the headquarters of the United Potato Growers of Idaho and District 7 of the Idaho Department of Health and Welfare. It is also the home to several small to medium sized national corporations such as North Wind, Inc., Melaleuca, Inc and Press-A-Print.
The median home price in Idaho Falls was $224,800 in January 2007.
Idaho Falls, Idaho / U.S. avg:
- Area population 122,995 / 647,500
- Median home price $224,800 / $235,000
- Cost-of-living index 99.8 / 100.0
- Unemployment rate 2.7% / 4.6%
- Job growth—5 years 18.84% / 4.90%
- Job growth—1 year 2.74% / 1.66%
- Median household income $47,719 / $46,326
Read more about this topic: Idaho Falls, Idaho
Famous quotes containing the word economy:
“The aim of the laborer should be, not to get his living, to get “a good job,” but to perform well a certain work; and, even in a pecuniary sense, it would be economy for a town to pay its laborers so well that they would not feel that they were working for low ends, as for a livelihood merely, but for scientific, or even moral ends. Do not hire a man who does your work for money, but him who does it for love of it.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Wise men read very sharply all your private history in your look and gait and behavior. The whole economy of nature is bent on expression. The tell-tale body is all tongues. Men are like Geneva watches with crystal faces which expose the whole movement.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“War. Fighting. Men ... every man in the whole realm is in the army.... Every man in uniform ... An economy entirely geared to war ... but there is not much war ... hardly any fighting ... yet every man a soldier from birth till death ... Men ... all men for fighting ... but no war, no wars to fight ... what is it, what does it mean?””
—Doris Lessing (b. 1919)