The Official Website of the State of Arkansas
To accompany the Economic Impacts of Outdoor Recreation in Arkansas report, we are releasing three sets of interactive data tools designed to help Arkansans better understand their outdoor economy—and uncover their own stories within it.
This first set highlights data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA), published through its Outdoor Recreation Satellite Account (ORSA), which measures statewide contributions of outdoor recreation to GDP, employment, and wages.
The Direct Impacts section focuses on data reported by the BEA, which capture the direct effects of the outdoor economy like fishing boat manufacturing and bike shop activity. Meanwhile, the Additional Impacts section explores the broader economic ripple effects—from the businesses that support the outdoor sector to the spending of outdoor workers in the wider economy.
Each interactive visualization includes example use cases to guide exploration. These examples are meant to serve as starting points: the tools themselves contain hundreds of potential stories about Arkansas’s evolving outdoor economy.
One of the most common misconceptions about the outdoor economy is that it consists only of tourism and retail activity. In Arkansas, that is far from the truth.
The bar chart below shows a breakdown of the state’s outdoor economy by industry sector. The total height of the bar represents the full direct contribution of outdoor recreation to Arkansas GDP in 2023: $4.5 billion. While Retail Trade and the broad Arts, Entertainment, Recreation, Accommodation, and Food Services (AERAFS) sector make up roughly half of this total, the other half tells a different story. Arkansas benefits significantly from the supply chains that bring outdoor goods to market—particularly manufacturing, transportation, warehousing, and wholesale trade, which together contributed $1.64 billion directly to the state economy.
Users can interact with the visualization to gain additional context. You can:
To illustrate one use case, change the metric to “Value Added as Share of State GDP (%)” and add Tennessee to the chart. Although Arkansas and Tennessee had similarly sized outdoor economies relative to their overall GDP in 2023, the industry composition differs substantially. For example, outdoor manufacturing and wholesale trade represent a significantly larger share of Arkansas’s outdoor economy than Tennessee’s.
While the bar chart is ideal for comparing the composition of outdoor economies across states and years, the line chart below is better suited for analyzing trends over time within specific industries.
By default, the chart displays outdoor recreation’s value added as a share of state GDP for Arkansas and Tennessee from 2012 to 2023. This adjustment for overall state economy size allows for more meaningful comparisons. As the data show, the two states have followed similar trajectories—with one notable exception: 2020 through 2022, when Tennessee’s outdoor economy was hit harder by the pandemic. A key reason for this difference is Tennessee’s heavier reliance on tourism-driven outdoor activity, which we observed in the earlier bar chart.
To explore this further, change the line chart’s metric to “Value Added to GDP ($),” remove Tennessee from the comparison, deselect “All Industries,” and select “Durable Goods Manufacturing” and “Arts, Entertainment, Recreation, Accommodation, and Food Services (AERAFS);” note that the dropdown menu displays the hierarchy of industry categories.Durable outdoor goods capture long-lasting, “durable” equipment like bicycles and kayaks. You’ll see that while outdoor durable goods manufacturing steadily increased its contribution to GDP in 2020 and 2021, the AERAFS sector—more directly tied to tourism—experienced a sharp decline during the early pandemic years.
Another valuable use of the line chart is exploring wage levels within the outdoor economy. One especially useful metric for students and job seekers is “Average Compensation Relative to Average for All Jobs in the State (%).” This metric shows whether outdoor jobs in a given sector tend to pay more—or less—than the statewide average.
When applied to Manufacturing, Wholesale Trade, and Transportation and Warehousing, we see that outdoor jobs in all three sectors tend to pay above average. In 2023, outdoor wholesale trade jobs paid 68% more than the Arkansas average, while transportation and warehousing paid 58% more.
Users can hover over data points on the chart to see how Arkansas ranks nationally in “wage premiums” for each sector. For instance, in 2023, outdoor transportation and warehousing jobs in Arkansas offered the 4th highest relative pay in the country.
To view pay in dollar terms, simply switch the metric to “Average Annual Compensation ($).” When doing so, we find that Arkansas outdoor wholesale jobs paid an average of $115,603 in 2023.
In addition to industry-level data, the BEA’s Outdoor Recreation Satellite Account also tracks GDP contributions by specific recreation activities. The line chart below visualizes trends for Fishing (excludes Boating), Hunting/Shooting/Trapping, and Motorcycling/ATVing.
When hovering over a line at a given year, users can view not just the dollar value, but also Arkansas’s national rank for that activity and growth from the previous year. Focusing on hunting and related activities, for example, we see a dramatic increase: from $94 million in 2019 to $202 million in 2023. This surge likely reflects the economic impacts of manufacturing expansions from companies like SIG Sauer, as well as the revitalization of the Remington ammunition facility in Lonoke.
While this activity-level data is rich, it comes with important limitations. The BEA does not break out most outdoor tourism spending by activity. Instead, all general tourism is grouped into a single category: “Travel and Tourism.” (The exceptions are camping and RVing, which are reported separately.)
As a result, activities like cycling, which attract thousands of tourists to Arkansas each year, may appear underrepresented in activity-level charts. These contributions are largely captured under Supporting Outdoor Recreation—a broad category that includes tourism, amenity construction, and public-sector spending tied to outdoor recreation.
To dive deeper into GDP contributions by activity, users can:
For cross-state comparisons, it’s best to use “Value Added as Share of State GDP (%),” which accounts for differences in economy size. To see why this matters, try leaving the metric as “Value Added to GDP ($)” and add Texas to the chart.
In 2023, fishing contributed $527 million to Texas’s economy—more than seven times the amount in Arkansas. But when adjusted for total state GDP, fishing plays a proportionally larger role in Arkansas than in Texas. Switching the metric to a relative share makes these comparisons more meaningful.
So far, we’ve focused on direct impacts—the jobs, wages, and GDP contributions that stem directly from outdoor recreation activities themselves. But the full economic impact goes further. The outdoor economy also generates indirect and induced impacts, both of which are essential for understanding its true scale.
Indirect impacts come from businesses that support outdoor recreation industries. These include Arkansas-based suppliers of boat parts for companies like Bass Cat, or the landscaping and maintenance services used by retailers such as Gearhead Outfitters.
Induced impacts arise when workers—both direct and indirect—spend their income at local businesses, creating new jobs and generating revenue across the broader economy. This includes spending on housing, groceries, childcare, and more.
The bar chart below shows the direct, indirect, and induced employment and GDP impacts of outdoor recreation in Arkansas. With the metric set to employment by default, we see that outdoor recreation directly supports 40,986 jobs—and indirectly or through induced effects, it supports another 27,445 jobs statewide.
The next bar chart breaks down total employment impact by industry and highlights how multiplier effects vary widely across sectors.
For example, outdoor manufacturing accounts for 3,680 direct jobs, but supports over 10,000 total jobs—a multiplier of 2.7 (10,034/3,680). This large effect reflects the industry’s complex supply chains and higher average wages. In contrast, outdoor retail has a smaller multiplier: 15,678 direct jobs support 5,833 additional jobs, due to lower margins, simpler inputs, and more localized spending.
The examples above highlight just a few of the insights these tools can offer, but their real value lies in what users discover for themselves. Whether you’re an educator, policymaker, entrepreneur, or outdoor enthusiast, we invite you to explore the data tools, ask your own questions, and uncover the stories that matter to you—and to Arkansas’s growing outdoor economy.
Definitions below are the official definitions provided by the Bureau of Economic Analysis or utilize information provided by the Bureau.