A new report from NACO — the National Association of Counties — looks at how counties have fared in 2012 – 2013 in terms of job growth and other evidence of economic output.
The “County Tracker 2013: On the Path to Recovery” is chock full of interesting insights about the nation’s continued growth but uneven economic recovery since the official end of the last recession in 2009.
Economic growth continued last year, but only 54 out of more than 3,000 counties could boast of the same levels of unemployment they had before the recession. Most of those counties were in the Midwest.
Here is how Ramsey County fares in the new report: economic output slowed a bit, though jobs grew. Median home prices also grew. The unemployment rate dropped by a small pinch, but certainly not enough to break out the balloons and party hats. A mixed bag, it seems.
Looking nationally, here’s more from the NACO website:
Growth continued in 2013, but the recovery is still fragile in some parts of the country. Across all regions, county economies registered at least modest growth in economic output (GDP), jobs and home prices and drops in unemployment in 2013. About half of U.S. county economies had no recession or recovered their economic output (GDP) lost during the recession by 2013, most of them in the South. About 800 county economies, mostly in the South and Midwest, had no drops in employment or were above their pre-recession levels in 2013. The housing sector witnessed the largest increase in recovery rates between 2012 and 2013 among all the indicators analyzed. Only 54 county economies, mostly in the Midwest, reached their pre-recession unemployment levels. – See more at: http://www.naco.org/research/Pages/county-tracker.aspx#sthash.rl1bQGbR.dpuf
A special thanks to @jamrockstar (https://twitter.com/jamrockstar) for alerting Twitter to this study…