What Happened to Twin Cities Employment
Our own Clinton Kennedy, a Senior Database Marketing Analyst at Impact Proven Solutions, has written a white paper asking the question “What will it take to truly recover from the recession?” Below is an excerpt:
When can the recession be said to be over or at least on the mend in order to anticipate a return to pre-recession consumer demand for goods and services? Economists generally use three quarters of GDP growth as the marker to say that a recession is over. In this sense, the recession is over and the recovery is well under way. Reported unemployment rose from down near 4% in 2002 to a high of over 8% in 2009 and 2010, and has since dropped in the Twin Cities MSA to just over 5%. However, consumer demand is showing a pattern of fits and starts, with significant hesitancy about spending. What is really going on out there?
Employment and the resulting cash flow is the basic driver of consumer spending and community vitality. One need only look at cities like Detroit, Youngstown, or Flint to see what happens to communities that lose their employment base and don’t replace it with other productive jobs. The community death spiral of the employment multiplier working in reverse hollows out a local economy until there is little community strength left. Conversely, cities such as Pittsburgh and Chicago present the strength that comes from diverse and aggressive economic activity replacing lost businesses with new ones.
Read the rest of the article here.