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 Which End of the Boat are You Sitting In?
by Tom Campbell
January 3, 2007
North Carolina will continue to see healthy growth in 2007, according to experts reporting at the 2007 Economic Forecast Forum. Real gross domestic product growth for the year should be between 2.7 and 3.25 percent, down perhaps slightly from the strong year just concluded. Inflation should remain moderate. John Allison of BB&T, one of the presenters delivering the optimistic forecast declared it had a “meaningful probability of being true.”
All this is good news to a state hard hit by job losses in textiles, furniture, and agriculture over the past decade. While our unemployment rate is slightly higher than the national average, it is not expected to grow. Harry Davis, economist from Appalachian State University projected a growth of 71,000 new jobs this year. State Treasurer Richard Moore reported there was a net gain of 133,000 jobs from November 2005 to November 2006, saying there are more people working today in North Carolina than ever before.
The 1200 attendees would have left feeling great about our state’s prospects had it not been for a presentation about Eastern Carolina made immediately prior to the luncheon. The 41 counties that make up Eastern Carolina, if grouped together as the 51st state would be, statistically, the poorest in the nation, attendees were told. Ten of the 20 poorest counties in the country are within the region.
The two million people in Eastern Carolina tend to be older, less healthy, less educated, less white, and more likely to live in poverty than the rest of the state. The region is more prone to natural disasters, has more health issues, sees more of its youth moving out, and has greater problems with infrastructure. Over the next ten years more jobs will be created in the service sector, requiring less than a GED education and possibly resulting in the average wage actually going down.
Not all is bleak, however. Tourism is increasing, as are the number of retirees moving in because of inexpensive real estate and less sprawl. There are pockets, mostly in the more populous sections, where pharmaceuticals and biotech companies are locating, where value-added agriculture is providing a spark, and small businesses are sprouting. Encouraging as these signs might be, they won’t slow the growing gap between the prospering Piedmont crescent along the I-85 corridor and the East.
“If there’s a hole in one end of the boat, it doesn’t matter which end you’re sitting in,” Tom Lambeth, Senior Fellow at the Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation was quoted as saying. Like it or not, we are all in the same boat. No matter how healthy the rest of the state, ultimately we will sink if we do not recognize and take action on this huge disparity in our eastern counties. We will transfer more and more resources into the region and never reach our full potential as a state. Nobody has a magic bullet that will instantly fix these problems. They were decades in the making and will take some time to heal. But the time for action is now. |
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