Fort Wayne.

• Author: Stafford, John
• Position: United States. Bureau of Economic Analysis

In September 2007, the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) released an important new tool for measuring the strength, composition, and output of urban economies. For the first time, we have federally compiled and easily accessible information on the gross domestic product (GDP) for all 363 metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) in the United States. GDP measures the market value of final goods and services produced within a given geographic area over a given period of time. This data had previously been available at the state and national levels, but not for sub-state areas. According to the BEA news release, metropolitan GDP is their "preferred and most comprehensive measure of economic activity." (1) The Bureau has provided five years of annual GDP data from 2001 through 2005.

Along with employment and wage data, GDP information now provides an important third measure of comparative local economic activity. Using population size to equalize for the varying size of the 363 MSAs, the Fort Wayne metropolitan area (2) ranked 130th, with a per capita GDP of $38,379 in 2005. In comparison, the Indianapolis-Carmel MSA has a per capita GDP of $53,441 and ranked twenty-fourth among all U.S. MSAs. Among those metro areas primarily located within Indiana, (3) the Elkhart-Goshen ($48,091), the Columbus ($46,719), and the Evansville ($42,012) MSAs also had per capita GDPs higher than the Fort Wayne area in 2005 (see Figure 1).

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The economic downturn in manufacturing in the early part of this decade hit the Fort Wayne area particularly hard. An examination of the changes in metropolitan GDP between 2001 and 2005 provides yet another indicator of that impact. The Fort Wayne MSA ranked 339th among the 363 MSAs in growth in GDP during this period, experiencing a 12.9 percent increase. The average increase for all U.S. MSAs was 22.8 percent. As illustrated in Figure 2, of the thirteen metro areas primarily located in Indiana, the Fort Wayne MSA ranked tenth in GDP growth between 2001 and 2005.

Let us shift gears and look at some recent employment trends in northeast Indiana. As was done in the past few outlooks, we will again use the Fort Wayne-Huntington-Auburn Combined Statistical Area (4) (CSA) as the best geographic representation of the Fort Wayne area economy. Between the first quarter of 2001 and the first quarter of 2007, this seven-county area lost a total of 4,124 jobs based on information from the U.S...