Winded
by James A. Bacon
Has Virginia already felt the impact of the slowdown in federal spending? That would seem to be the obvious conclusion from 2012 metropolitan-area job data released last month by the Bureau of Labor Statistics and highlighted by Aaron M. Renn on the New Geography blog.
After years and years of growing more rapidly than the United States economy, the Washington metropolitan area scored 10th from bottom among the nation’s 51 largest regions in 2012. The number of jobs increased by 32,200, a 1.07% increase for the year.
Hampton Roads, did even worse, scoring 7th from bottom — putting it in the same company as rust-belt basket cases like St. Louis, Rochester, Providence, Buffalo and Philadelphia. The metro area created only 6,100 jobs, an increase of 0.83%. Like the Washington region, Hampton Roads is heavily dependent upon military spending. The difference is, it lacks the dynamic technology sector that, one might hope, can take up the slack.
The Richmond region scored in the muddled middle, creating 12,500 jobs, for a 0.83% increase. The virtue of Richmond’s economy is that it is diversified. The downside of Richmond’s economy is that it lacks a star industry cluster to lead job growth.
Bacon’s bottom line: Two key points:
First: These job numbers reinforce the fears that I have expressed repeatedly that job and population growth in Northern Virginia is veering from trend lines and that long-term forecasts that form the basis of future transportation demand are, at best, highly speculative, and at worst, terribly flawed.
Second: How much more data do we need to be persuaded that Virginia is losing its economic mojo? Yes, I’m delighted that Richmond’s Hamilton Beach Brands will be shipping small appliances to China, that WhiteWave Foods Company is investing $70 million to expand operations in Rockingham County, and that Orbital Sciences Corporation has successfully launched its new Antares rocket from Wallop’s Island, to mention three bits of good news from the past week. But that’s anecdotal froth upon the economic wave. The underlying numbers are grim.
Virginia is pursuing economic development pretty much the same way it did in 1986 when I first started covering the subject for Virginia Business magazine. Our economic development professionals have gotten smarter, more sophisticated and more tech savvy but they’re still doing essentially the same thing they always have — recruiting corporate investment, marketing to tourists and promoting sales of agricultural products.
Every gubernatorial administration is required by law to update the state’s strategic economic development plan. Every administration consults the same “stakeholders” (vested interests), and every plan comes out looking largely the same as the one before. It’s time to wake up, people!
