Indiana.

• Author: Conover, Jerry N.
• Position: The Big Picture

As the nation's most manufacturing-intensive state, Indiana often feels the effects of economic downturns earlier than other states, and those effects tend to last longer. That was the case for the most recent recession and recovery period, but Indiana now appears to be slowly regaining the ground it lost over the past few years.

The most-watched indicator of Indiana's economy is total monthly nonfarm employment (which does not include self-employment). As shown in Figure 1, Indiana's employment bottomed out in April 2002 at 2,888,000 workers, a decline of 128,000 jobs from the state's peak employment in May 2000. Since hitting that minimum, Indiana has regained 28,500 jobs as of September 2004--a modest increase to be sure, but an increase nonetheless. Moreover, employment growth is becoming more regular. The state has experienced nine consecutive months of job gains compared to figures from the previous year, the first such streak since 2000. In comparative terms, however, forty-two states have higher job growth rates than Indiana, whose employment growth was 0.5 percent over the past twelve months.

An End to Manufacturing Losses?

The largest share of Indiana's job loss in recent years has come from the manufacturing sector, which lost 104,100 jobs from its December 1999 zenith (when manufacturing accounted for 22.4 percent of all employment in Indiana) to its March 2004 nadir (19.5 percent). Part of this job loss is attributable to outsourcing of work from the payrolls of factories to other organizations (though in some cases the same workers continue to operate under the same roof as before, but for a new vendor firm); while perhaps a larger impact has come from increased productivity. Fortunately, the shrinkage of Indiana's manufacturing employment appears to have subsided, and the state weighed in with 1,300 more factory jobs in September than in March 2004.

Service sector growth has counteracted...