Washington Business Summer 2018 | Washington Business | Page 31

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washington in six-plus-one parts
The BCG-Roundtable report divided the state into “six parts based
on human geography (connected regions where people live, work
commute and trade).” The six — Olympic, Southwest, North I-5,
Southwest, South Central, North Central and Eastern — show clear
differences while sharing common characteristics.
It’s appropriate to consider the regions as six separate econo-
mies, said Sean Matthewson, principal with Boston Consulting
Group in Seattle.
“Obviously, the major differences are urban and rural,”
Matthewson says, adding that 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.”
“The reality is that the solutions within each of these regions don’t
fit into a nice neat statewide economic development box,” says Wash-
ington Roundtable Vice President Neil Strege. While some issues
transcend local areas — infrastructure and workforce development,
for example — others are directly tied to local concerns.
“The regional economies are different,” he says, “and their needs
are different.”
Washington Research Council (WRC) research director and
economist Kriss Sjoblom believes that the regional variation within
the state has increased over time.
“The state is a collection of separate regional economies that have
remarkably little linkage between them,” he says. “Probably less
linkage today than they had 50 years ago, in part due to globalization.
“As the regions tie into global markets, the local linkages are
attenuated some.”
Given its size and prosperity, King County gets singled out in
this article for separate treatment as a seventh region. As Sjoblom
says, “Statistics of the state are dominated by the largest economy
in the state, the Seattle metro area.” Pulling it out allows a better
understanding of how the North I-5 corridor looks exclusive of the
outsized impact of King County.
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