The 2021 State Latino GDP Report, produced with generous funding from the Bank of America Charitable Foundation, provides a factual view of the large and rapidly growing economic contribution of Latinos living in targeted areas of the United States. Arizona, California, Florida, Illinois, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, and Texas collectively contain nearly three-quarters of the Nation’s Latino population. This report provides detailed analysis of the state-level Latino GDPs for these eight states, benchmarked against the broader U.S. Latino GDP. At the time of writing, the most recent year for which the core data were available is 2018. Thus, the report provides a snapshot of the total economic contribution of Latinos in that year.
As a summary statistic for the economic performance of Latinos, the U.S. Latino GDP is breath-taking. The total economic output of Latinos in the United States was $2.6 trillion in 2018. If Latinos living in the U.S. were an independent country, their GDP would be the eighth largest in the world. The U.S. Latino GDP is most noteworthy for its extraordinary growth. Illinois’s 2018 Latino GDP is $100.1 billion, larger than the entire economic output of the state of Hawaii. The economic contribution of Latinos in Illinois, as with the broader U.S., is driven by rapid gains in human capital, strong work ethic, and a positive health profile. From 2010 to 2018, Illinois Latino educational attainment grew at a rate 2.9 times faster than Non-Latinos. Over those same years, the Latino labor force participation rate was an average of 5.9 percentage points higher than Non-Latinos. Other key notes that were found in the report include:
• Illinois’ top three Latino GDP sectors were: Education & Healthcare (14.5 percent share of the Illinois Latino GDP), Professional & Business Services (11.2 percent), and Durables Manufacturing (10.3 percent).
• Latinos added an average of more than 29,000 people per year to Illinois’ population, while the Non-Latino population shrank by an average of nearly 20,000 people per year.
• Illinois Latino’s labor force participation rate was an average of 5.9 percentage points higher than Non-Latinos.
• Latino educational attainment grew at a rate of 2.9 times faster than the educational attainment of Non-Latinos.
