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Wednesday, March 17, 2010
City Getting Back on Its Feet Faster
By Winthrop Quigley
Copyright © 2010 Albuquerque Journal Journal Staff Writer
The Albuquerque metropolitan area economy is recovering from the recession faster than most of the country and is the fastest growing of the 10 largest metropolitan areas in the Intermountain West, according to a report to be released today by Brookings Mountain West.
The partnership of the Brookings Institution and the University of Nevada at Las Vegas provided its Mountain Monitor report to the Journal. It shows Albuquerque's economic output has topped the peak it reached in the fourth quarter of 2008 before the area joined the national recession that began in December 2007. Employment rose slightly between the third and fourth quarters of 2009, making Albuquerque the only one of the 10 largest Intermountain West metropolitan areas to post job growth.
"This is not a great, vibrant period in Albuquerque's economic history," said Mark Muro, the Washington, D.C., director of Brookings Mountain West in a phone interview. "Yet this evidence suggests you're moving out of recession faster than most other places. It's a rare double-double: You've recovered your pre-recession output level and have begun to see positive job growth. Job growth has been extremely elusive."
According to Mountain Monitor, Albuquerque's gross metropolitan product grew 1.8 percent between the fourth quarter of 2008 and the same period in 2009.
Employment declined 3.7 percent from its peak in the fourth quarter of 2007 to the fourth quarter of 2009 but grew 0.1 percent between the third and fourth quarters of 2009, the only one of the 10 largest metropolitan areas to show job growth.
More recent data from the New Mexico Department of Workforce Solutions showed the unemployment rate for the Albuquerque metropolitan statistical area was 8.9 percent in January, up from 8.4 percent in December. However, job growth and unemployment statistics are compiled from different sources and sometime tell a conflicting story.
Gross metropolitan product is the total value of goods and services produced within a metropolitan area, as estimated by Moody's Economy.com. Mountain Monitor uses federal Bureau of Labor Statistics data for its employment numbers.
The 10 largest Intermountain West metropolitan areas lost 2.2 percent in GMP value from their pre-recession peaks to the fourth quarter. The 100 largest areas in the nation lost 0.9 percent, and the gross domestic product for the United States didn't grow at all between December 2007 and the fourth quarter of 2009.
The 10 Intermountain areas saw employment decline 7.4 percent between pre-recession peaks and the fourth quarter of 2009, the 100 largest metropolitan areas in the country declined 4.6 percent, and employment nationwide was down 4.9 percent.
Muro credited Albuquerque's relative success to its educational institutions, the large health care component in the local economy and the government sector. None of those sectors lost much ground during the recession, he said.
"The Albuquerque region was not deeply entangled in the worst excesses of the real estate bubble," Muro said. Las Vegas, Nev., Phoenix and Boise, on the other hand, were among the most "entangled in speculative real estate and risky loan activities, and they blew up," he said.
Those three cities were the worst-performing of the 10 areas studied.
"You export a bit, and that's helpful," Muro said. "Places that export services have done quite well."
"It probably feels like cold comfort," he added. Though Albuquerque outperformed the region, "this is clearly relatively flat."
Mountain Monitor also evaluates the economies of Colorado Springs, Salt Lake City, Denver, Ogden, Provo and Tucson.
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