According to the wise people who officially keep track of such things, the recession in the national economy ended in November 2001.  Now as we plant our spring flowers and prepare for race day in 2004, more than two full years beyond that point, we can tell you this.  The recession in Indiana is over as well.

There are no official scorekeepers of recessions for states like Indiana , for the simple reason that there’s really no such thing as a state-specific recession.  But as all of us who have grown up in the Midwest know all too well, recessions in the national economy leave a different sized footprint here than they do elsewhere.  And when they linger as long as this one has, the confidence that the cycle will turn can falter.

If your confidence in Indiana ’s economic turnaround has suffered, then maybe this news will cheer you up.

It has been a good first quarter for job growth in the Indiana economy.  The release of March payroll employment estimates by the Department of Workforce Development puts the average payroll totals for the first three months of the year at 2,876,000  jobs, which is 0.7 percent above the job tally for the same period last year. That’s the strongest year-over-year growth performance by the state’s employers in any quarter since 2000.

That job growth was almost strong enough to place us in the upper half of the state rankings, believe it or not.  After so many years of suffering job losses that were much worse than the national average, the news that Indiana ’s first quarter job growth was faster than that of 24 other states is welcome news, even if it’s overdue.

The prospects of continued growth for the coming months appear to be excellent as well, especially for the industrial sector of the economy.  Profits of companies like General Motors and Ford are healthy, and investment spending is ramping up.  Higher than expected retail sales growth and continued strength in industrial output make it certain that overall economic growth, when it is announced later this month, will continue to be strong.  And back-to-back monthly increases in durable goods orders that were much stronger than analysts had expected will pour more fuel on the expansionary fire.

Not everyone has been invited to the party. Some other Midwest states, particularlyMichigan and Illinois , continue to shed jobs. State governments, whose leaky tax instruments exempt much of the booming services and internet economy, have yet to see their revenues keep pace.  And in places like Marion and Crane, where huge employers are either gone or hanging by a thread, the general turnaround in the economy has not been cause for much celebration.

It’s harder still to appreciate that right now, just as we appear to be rebounding from our painful experience in the 2001 recession, the need to restructure and diversify our economy remains just as urgent as when we were losing jobs right and left. 

Getting Indiana more solidly plugged into the national growth engine, ending the decline in our relative standard of living and the out-migration of younger college-educated people remain challenges just as daunting today as they did before the recession began. It would be a shame to lose focus on those issues just because a shift in the economic winds has granted us this breathing spell.