“The Mountain West is clearly leaps and bounds above the rest the country,” said Adam Kamins, an economist at Moody’s Analytics.
Utah, Idaho and Montana saw their jobs return fastest to the pre-pandemic employment levels of February 2020 and were leading the nation in employment growth — at 4.99%, 4.95% and 3.25%, respectively, in March. These three states, along with Arizona and Colorado, had all recovered their losses, with Nevada, Wyoming and New Mexico lagging slightly behind, BLS data shows.
The South has also emerged as a strong region for job recovery, Kamins said, noting employment surges in Texas, Florida, North Carolina, Georgia and Tennessee. Other states that have made a full employment recovery include Arkansas, South Dakota and Indiana.
One key reason for the robust growth in these areas is an influx of new residents, Kamins said. The pandemic and the increased ability for remote work spurred more people to migrate from dense and costly cities to less expensive regions of the country, Kamins said.
In recent years, cities like Austin, Texas; Boise, Idaho; Bozeman, Montana and Denver have become havens for coastal transplants seeking cheaper housing and a change of pace.
As the pandemic dragged on, regional and local approaches to the health crisis played their role as well, said Oren Klachkin, a lead economist with Oxford Economics.
“In general, we’ve seen that the Midwest and the South, from an economic perspective, have been hit relatively less severely [by the pandemic] and that is because of local officials and how they responded to the shock itself,” he said. “Meanwhile, we’re seeing cities on the West Coast and on the East Coast, particularly in the Northeast, are still lagging overall in terms of their recovery.”
Many coastal cities and states — notably New York and California — implemented stringent restrictions on people and businesses when the pandemic hit.
The measures, which negatively affected the tourism, leisure and hospitality industries, hit particularly hard in places like New York City and Los Angeles, which rely heavily on those sectors. Additionally, those restrictions were typically in place longer — and oftentimes applied more intermittently in the coastal states than in states that opened their economies more quickly, said Mark Vitner, a senior economist with Wells Fargo.
“[States like Florida] were more consistent in the way that they handled the pandemic, whereas California and New York wavered on which businesses could open and when they were allowed to reopen, and then the rules changed,” he said.
Source : CNN