The Prosperity Gap: Closing the Gap Between Greenville’s Economic Output and Personal Income

The Greenville Chamber’s vision is a globally competitive Upstate economy where businesses succeed and people prosper. We believe that when people prosper, businesses win, too. One way the Greenville Chamber tracks our community’s prosperity is by monitoring key community and economic data. We leverage this data to inform and influence important decisions in our community. However, no single datapoint paints the full picture. What happens when two important economic indicators tell different parts of the same story?

Greenville County touts a strong Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per capita that performs at parity with the national average. GDP as a stand-alone metric serves as a primary scorecard to gauge the overall health, size, and growth rate of an economy. Greenville County is the second largest economy in the state and is the most populous. Factors including Greenville’s strong advanced manufacturing sector and its diverse economy are major contributing factors. By all accounts, Greenville’s GDP is headed in the right direction.

Conversely, for more than two decades, Greenville County’s per capita personal income metric (PCPI) has fallen well-below the national average. PCPI measures the average personal income earned by residents and is a widely used indicator of local prosperity. Currently, Greenville County falls at 87.6 percent of the national average. In 2024 alone, this deficit equates to more than $5 billion in unrealized annual economic activity for our community.

However, neither GDP nor PCPI tells the full story on its own. While Greenville County is consistently generating above-average economic output, the data suggests that more residents could be doing better. The contrast leaves us asking ourselves an important question: how do we convert Greenville’s strong economic productivity into greater prosperity for more residents?

The data points to several solutions:

• Continue increasing Greenville’s industry mix

  • Adding more advanced industry and types of jobs, including high-wage, high-skill, high-demand positions, will directly improve Greenville’s overall PCPI.

• More competitive wages

  • Continue creating conditions that enable employers to offer increasingly competitive wages through higher productivity, innovation, and workforce development.

• Develop entrepreneurs and talent

  • Through the Greenville Chamber’s Accelerate initiative, we directly support programs that strengthen Greenville’s entrepreneurial ecosystem, upskill our workforce, and develop future leaders. Programs like the South Carolina Business Accelerator, NextGEN, LaunchGVL, and TalentRiseSC are important factors in strengthening our businesses and our workforce.

As a community, we must reconcile Greenville’s strong GDP with our underperformance in PCPI. Greenville is not an average community, and we should not aspire to average outcomes. A rising tide lifts all boats. That’s why our North Star is simple: We want shared community prosperity built on economic opportunity, economic mobility, and quality of life. That objective drives everything we do.

Greenville’s next chapter will be defined by how effectively we address the opportunities and challenges in front of us. Ultimately, our success will be measured by whether more people are benefiting from the opportunities being created here. When we focus on strategies that improve PCPI while building upon the momentum of our GDP, we’ll find a more prosperous community where businesses succeed AND people prosper.