Public policy pushed by state legislatures and governors doesn’t always explain the presence or absence of job growth. Some parts of the country have stagnated for decades.
Job growth tends to appear in locations where the population is also growing. But does population growth attract jobs or does the availability of jobs attract labor in search of work? Probably both.
More often than not, job growth is centered in the nation's big cities, but some cities continue to lose jobs and population as they have for the last 50 years.
Since the low point of the Great Recession, almost 12 million jobs were added to the economy but 1,445 counties across the US have fewer jobs today than they did 5 years ago. Some are still digging out of the recession. Some aren’t. All of the counties shaded orange on the map above have fewer jobs today than they did when the nationwide recovery began.
The county with the biggest job loss is Wayne, Michigan, which includes the city of Detroit. Since the recovery began, 21,513 jobs were lost there. To tell the whole story, Wayne County was already losing jobs before the recession began, 60,000 from 2005 to 2008. And while the nationwide recovery began in February 2010, it didn’t start in Wayne County until two years later.
Jump over the cute little orange critter staring at you for maps with the most recent data and hints about the state of the recovery.
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