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According to the wise people who officially
keep track of such things, the recession in the national economy
ended in November 2001. Now
as we plant our spring flowers and prepare for race day in 2004,
more than two full years beyond that point, we can tell you this.
The recession in
Indiana
is over as well.
There are no official scorekeepers of recessions for states like
Indiana
, for the simple reason that there’s really no such thing as a
state-specific recession. But
as all of us who have grown up in the
Midwest
know all too well, recessions in the national economy leave a
different sized footprint here than they do elsewhere.
And when they linger as long as this one has, the confidence
that the cycle will turn can falter.
If your confidence in
Indiana
’s economic turnaround has suffered, then maybe this news will
cheer you up.
It has been a good first quarter for job growth in the
Indiana
economy. The release of
March payroll
employment estimates by the Department of Workforce Development
puts the average payroll totals for the first three months of the
year at 2,876,000 jobs,
which is 0.7 percent above
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the job tally for the same period last year.
That’s the strongest year-over-year growth performance by the
state’s employers in any quarter since 2000.
That job growth was almost strong enough to place
us in the upper half of the state rankings, believe it or not.
After so many years of suffering job losses that were much worse
than the national average, the news that
Indiana
’s first quarter job growth was faster than that of 24 other states is
welcome news, even if it’s overdue.
The prospects of continued growth for the coming months appear to be
excellent as well, especially for the industrial sector of the economy.
Profits of companies like General Motors and Ford are healthy,
and investment spending is ramping up.
Higher than expected retail
sales growth and continued strength in industrial
output make it certain that overall economic growth, when it is
announced later this month, will continue to be strong.
And back-to-back monthly increases in durable
goods orders that were much stronger than analysts had expected will
pour more fuel on the expansionary fire.
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Not everyone has been invited to the party.
Some other
Midwest
states, particularly
Michigan
and
Illinois
, continue to shed jobs. State
governments, whose leaky tax instruments exempt much of the booming
services and internet economy, have yet to see their revenues keep pace.
And in places like Marion and Crane, where huge employers are
either gone or hanging by a thread, the general turnaround in the
economy has not been cause for much celebration.
It’s harder still to appreciate that right now,
just as we appear to be rebounding from our painful experience in the
2001 recession, the need to restructure and diversify our economy
remains just as urgent as when we were losing jobs right and left.
Getting Indiana more solidly plugged into the national growth engine,
ending the decline in our relative standard of living and the
out-migration of younger college-educated people remain challenges just
as daunting today as they did before the recession began.
It would be a shame to lose focus on those issues just because a
shift in the economic winds has granted us this breathing spell.
Patrick M. Barkey
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