Flatlining
Statewide population and job count trends have been troubling over the last eight years. With elections coming this fall, voters should press candidates on how they’d turn things around.
One of the more meaningful domestic trends coming out of the pandemic is the massive migration of people and capital from the Northeast, Midwest, and West coast to Southern states. As Bloomberg reported a few weeks ago, there has been $100 billion in aggregate income that has moved from other parts of the country to the Southeast – that’s an incredible amount of purchasing power that is stimulating local and state economies from Texas to Florida to the Carolinas.
Unfortunately, it appears as if Louisiana has sat this boom out.
Louisiana has become an outlier among its regional peers regarding population and job growth. Since the start of 2016, the state has lost over 90,000 residents and 3,000 jobs. Only one other state, Mississippi, lost population since the start of 2016. But despite their population loss, they still managed 4.0% job growth, while Louisiana saw a slight decline. To put the growth rates of our peers into perspective, had Louisiana just grown at their average rate, we’d presently have 239,000 more jobs and 301,000 more residents than we do currently. There’s often discussion about how Louisiana can emulate Texas and Florida, but even following in the footsteps of Arkansas and Oklahoma would be a marked improvement from our current trajectory.
Population and jobs are not the only important economic indicators out there, but they tend to reflect the general health of an economy: as a population grows, it requires more goods and services, which leads to more jobs. More jobs lead to higher incomes, and studies show higher incomes have a positive impact on population growth.
Digging into the data within the state, although some metro areas saw positive job and population growth, each one lagged the median Southern state in both metrics.
While the state lost 90,000 residents since 2016, the Capital Region gained 16,000; where the state lost a few thousand jobs, our region gained more than 25,000. But in the broader context of economic growth, Baton Rouge1 area residents can’t just sit back and relax: while our growth may be near the top of Louisiana metros, it lagged out-of-state peer metros like Greenville (14.5% job growth since January 2016), Birmingham (8.4%), and Louisville (7.4%).
It's vital that community and business leaders across Louisiana not only acknowledge these troubling statewide trends but seek solutions to them with resolve. Within the next month, BRAC will be releasing its election platform, highlighting policies we see as vital to spurring growth in these and other key areas.
As fall elections approach, Louisiana residents will have the opportunity to engage with legislative and statewide candidates as they campaign in local communities. Considering the pressing need to reverse recent population loss and job stagnation, it’s worth asking anyone seeking office how they intend to stem the tide of people and jobs leaving the state, while attracting new ones at the same time. Voters should crib the old James Carville line and remind folks, “It’s still the economy, stupid.”
For jobs, the Baton Rouge metro area is defined as Ascension, East Baton Rouge, East Feliciana, Iberville, Livingston, Pointe Coupee, St. Helena, West Baton Rouge, and West Feliciana; for population, it’s those nine plus Assumption