Remember all of those stories about Indiana’s dismal ranking among other states in job growth during and after the recession of 2001?  Any time you come in dead last it gets people’s attention.  By most measures, Indiana’s percentage job loss held that dubious distinction, when measured from our pre-recession peak in 2000. 

It was bad enough to be behind every other state in percentage net job creation, as the data showed us throughout 2002.  But the data showed that until the bigger Michigan economy eclipsed us last year, Indiana had suffered a greater absolute job loss than any other state, large or small, from the beginning of 2000.

That’s now a story for the archives.  For one thing, the recession has been over for more than two years and, sound bites notwithstanding, we are no longer losing significant numbers of jobs.  But even more significant, as we reported a few weeks ago, the statisticians who prepared all of those numbers for us have made some changes to the scorecards.  This week’s release of revised job data for all fifty states plus the District of Columbia gives us a second take on the employment horse race.

It’s still a pretty grim story, to be sure. 

Employment growth has been less than robust in this economic recovery, and the state level data show it. Employment in calendar year 2003 stood higher than it was in 2000 for only 15 states.  In fact, over the last complete year available, 2003, 31 of the 51 states were still losing jobs.

Indiana was one of the losers, but not to the extent we previously thought.  Our revised employment change in calendar 2003 represented a scant 0.1 percent of our total payroll, as we reported two weeks ago.  With the release of data for other states, we now know that this puts us in 25^th place, exactly in the middle of the pack.  That’s quite a different picture than what has been portrayed in last year’s headlines.

Of course, part of our state’s economic troubles stem from the fact that we got an early start in suffering the job losses that eventually snowballed into a recession.  So a better perspective on the Indiana economy’s performance relative to other states can be gained by using its pre-recession peak, in year 2000, as a point of reference and comparison.  How do the new data say we measure up?

The answer is:  not very well. Revising the employment numbers didn't pull silk out of a sow's ear, to be sure, but it erased a bit of the shame we endured last year. Between the calendar years 2003 and 2000, the Indiana economy suffered a 3.4 percent job loss.  Only four states fared worse than we did – Illinois, Ohio, Massachusetts and Michigan.  Having a few of our Midwest neighbors join us at the bottom is cold comfort, and really doesn’t reduce any of the urgency in the need to find a new spark for our economic engine.

But it does pour water on the notion that there is something uniquely wrong about the Indiana economy.  The new data portray a manufacturing-intensive state suffering in a post-recession climate that has yet to let up on manufacturers.  If any state demonstrates that it is Michigan, where the unemployment rate is 6.6 percent and employment is down more than 5.5 percent from payroll levels of three years ago.

Revising a few employment numbers doesn’t put people to work, or put dollars in the state treasury.  In fact, it changes very little about the problems our leadership faces in turning the economy around.  But for those of us who have a few recessions under our belts, it makes everything look a bit more familiar.