GDP: Oil Patch Booms While Northeast Lags
The U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis’s data on state-by-state GDP for 2013 lags GDP figures already released for the entire U.S. In March, the bureau reported that GDP nationwide rose by 1.9 percent in 2013. That compared to 2.8 percent growth in 2012.
But drill down, and economic growth varies widely between the states, says Alan Berube, who helps compile the Metro Monitor at the Brookings Institution.
“The picture is still one of a multi-speed recovery,” says Berube.
Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, predicts that the states that grew fastest in 2013 — and likely have continued to grow strongly in 2014 — are on the West Coast (California, Oregon and Washington), where home prices have strongly rebounded and high-tech barely faltered in the recession. Other bright spots: states in the South and High Plains where oil and natural gas are booming.
“North Dakota will continue to look really good,” says Zandi. “Texas — the strongest big economy in the country throughout the recession and recovery — that will continue. I think we’ll see some states that got nailed in the housing bust turning more definitively up — Nevada, Arizona and Florida — where the leisure and hospitality industry has also come back.”
While growth rates now look reasonably strong in the upper Midwest, where manufacturing is still a major economic force, “it’s like a rubber ball,” says Alan Berube. “They just bounced back because they crashed so hard. Cleveland, Detroit, Toledo — they’ve been in a long-term recession with job losses dating back to the early 2000’s. So they’re doing better than they were two or three years ago — a lot better. But they’re still not quite as well off as they were a decade or two ago.”
Economic growth has lagged in recent years in New England (outside the Boston Metro area, which is a hub for finance, high-tech and higher education), and also in the Mid-Atlantic states: New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Delaware.
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