Report: St. Louis jobs recovery three years away
It’s been a rough three years for the economy in many parts of the country, and St. Louis is no exception. Now a new report says it’ll be three more years before the region’s economy is fully healed. A study issued today by the U.S. Conference of Mayors predicts that the number of jobs in the St. Louis region won’t return to pre-recession levels until the third quarter of 2014. It’ll take that long to build back the nearly 82,000 jobs that have disappeared since 2008, according to the study, conducted by forecasting firm IHS Global Insight. And they expect the unemployment rate here to remain high – 8.6 percent in 2013. The jobless rate was 5.3 percent in 2007.
The picture was similar for many metro areas. IHS predicts that the average U.S. metro won’t return to peak employment until the second quarter of 2014; in some places, among them Detroit and Cleveland, a jobs recovery is at least a decade away. The study also predicts that metro St. Louis’ $129 billion economy will grow 2.3 percent this year, faster than 2010’s 1.6 percent clip and enough to recover all its losses in the recession.
The broader point of the report, which examined 363 metro areas, was to point out the huge role that cities and their suburbs play in the nation’s economy. Those metro areas are home to 89 percent of economic activity and 87 percent of jobs, and big metros are home to much of that. “We believe the national economy can recover most quickly by promoting and assuring the economic health of its metropolitan areas,” the study said.
It pointed out that St. Louis, with the nation’s 20th biggest metro economy, is home to more economic activity than 20 states, and more than dozens of nations including Iraq, Kuwait and Vietnam. The St. Louis region also generates 44 percent of economic activity in Missouri, and 3.2 percent in Illinois.
-Tim Logan
