By Joe Sullivan
Wednesday, September 24, 2008
When Knoxville-area economic boosters launched a heralded Jobs Now! program in 2002, their goal of creating 35,000 new jobs in the six-county area over the next five years seemed ambitious at first blush.
So when the five-year results that met the goal were announced at a proverbial power breakfast, the booster group was predictably proud of them. But at the risk of raining on their $11 million parade (the cost of Jobs Now! recruitment and promotional efforts), the results weren’t really all that rosy.
From an employment base of about 369,000 in 2002, per the Federal Bureau of Labor Statistics, the 35,000 job increase to about 404,000 in 2007 amounts to 9.5 growth. That’s a compounded annual growth rate of a little over 1.5 percent during a period when the national economy was surging.
According to a recently released study by the respected Milken Institute, the Knoxville area ranked 76th among the nation’s 200 larger metropolitan areas in job growth over that five-year span. That’s better than average, to be sure—and also better than the state of Tennessee as a whole—but not by very much.
By the way that the Knoxville Chamber and its Jobs Now! partners prefer to measure it, job growth in the area over the five-year span slightly exceeded 40,000. But this way applies a multiplier to “direct” jobs created by new business locations and expansions to calculate “indirect” employment growth derived from them. The chamber’s consulting scorekeeper, Sharon Younger of Younger Associates in Jackson, says these multipliers are constructed by the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis and have good predictive value. But she goes on to acknowledge that it may be better to utilize net job growth data that also takes into account job losses from layoffs and the like; and her measure of the area’s net job growth from 2002 to 2007 just about equals the BLS’ 35,000 increase in employment for that period.
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