A new study by LendingTree found cities that rely heavily on businesses in the food and accommodation, retail, and arts, entertainment and recreation sectors are most vulnerable to the economic impact of the coronavirus. According to their data, the Bakersfield metro area has the 9th most vulnerable economy in the country.
LendingTree analyzed metro areas across the U.S. to find the cities with the highest density of businesses in the three industries most impacted by the pandemic to determine which cities are most vulnerable during COVID-19.
According to their research, 27.5% of Bakersfield businesses fall in the food and accommodation, retail, and arts, entertainment and recreation sectors.
In order to rank the places with the highest density of industries vulnerable to coronavirus, researchers looked at data for three industries: food and accommodation, retail, and arts, entertainment and recreation. They compared the number of establishments in each of these three industries to the total number of establishments in each metro area. The metro area with the highest percent of establishments in those three industries ranked first, while the metro with the lowest score ranked last. Data comes from the Census Bureau’s Business Patterns and is from 2017.
