washington business
urban-rural divide
As important: Experts expect the expansion to continue. That confidence led to a whopping $ 1.3 billion increase in February’ s official state revenue forecast, easing the path to an on-time budget agreement without major tax increases.
Yet, Washingtonians know that what’ s called the state economy is often not the economy in their cities and towns. Job creation and investment is uneven, as is the mix of business and industry. Some communities are unaffordable for all but the very rich. In others, housing prices have shown much more moderate growth.
AWB has called attention to this urban-rural divide, the split between prosperous metros and struggling small towns. Concern with lagging rural economic development led AWB to host two Rural Jobs Summits in 2017 and sparked an important statewide policy debate. A 2018 Rural Jobs Summit is planned for November. And it has prompted an interest in digging deeper into regional differences to understand the anatomy of Washington’ s economy.
Though it’ s likely every Washingtonian has an idea about how to carve up the state, there’ s always going to be something arbitrary about how to divide Washington into discrete regions. This review draws on a regional map created by the Boston Consulting Group( BCG) in partnership with the Washington Roundtable in their joint report, Unlocking Washington’ s Full Potential: A Framework for Diversified & Inclusive Economic Growth.
“ Thinking about the subareas provides a nice way of understanding what policy levers you might be able to deploy to improve the economic outlook in a given region.”
— Sean Matthewson, principal, Boston Consulting Group
At A Glance
The King County metro area is by far the state’ s largest employment, income and population center. To a large extent, the King County economy is the state economy.
Increasing job creation in“ underperforming regions” will add thousands of jobs to the state and reduce economic disparities.
Unlocking Washington’ s Full Potential www. waroundtable. com / wp-content / uploads / 2018 / 01 / UnlockingthePotentialWA. pdf
Washington state Employment Security Department Labor Market Information esd. wa. gov / labormarketinfo
30 association of washington business