The Bay Area Council Economic Institute (BACEI) is out with a new report that integrates data from multiple sources, including the biennial Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) numbers we featured here several months ago, and presents a revealing county-by-county portrait illustrating where within the U.S. high-tech jobs are found. And the result is quite striking: it’s not just in Silicon Valley, but rather in communities all across the country where there have recently been increases of more than 10 percent in high-tech employment.

Here are some of the takeaways the BACEI highlighted in its report:

• Since the dot-com bust, jobs in the high-tech sector have performed better than for the private sector as a whole.

• A minimum of 61% of counties had at least some high-tech jobs in 2011 — data limitations prevent a truer and larger estimate because data are suppressed in sparsely populated counties to protect the identity of individual companies. Estimates for many counties are not available.

• Metro areas with the fastest growing high-tech jobs are geographically and economically diverse.

• In 2009, more than 72% of counties had at least one new business establishment in the high-tech sector.

• High-tech startups have held relatively steady during the economic downturn, even while new business establishments across the entire private sector have declined.

Check out the short report, and play around with the companion Google Map-based visualization. And see our earlier coverage of the BLS data here.

(Contributed by Erwin Gianchandani, CCC Director)