We got some good news about Camden County in late April — the county was the leading metropolitan region in the country for rate of job growth at 3.7%. I had a chance to talk to WHYY about that news. Hopefully you’ll enjoy the piece. But I also did some wider prep to put these numbers into context. The local job growth is the result of (at least) three intersecting trends: 1) national improvement 2) regional growth and 3) local policy. All three deserve a little more discussion, particularly as the jobs report is being oversimplified — both by Freeholder Lou Capelli in the WHYY piece and Congressman Don Norcross is his op-ed titled Camden is Really Rising — as the direct result of policy. That’s an exaggeration, but one with kernels of truth.
First, any job growth needs to be put into national context. The Bureau of Labor Statistics showed that 34 or the 38 metro regions in this slice of data were seeing growth, and the median rate of that growth was 1.9%. The Camden region growth comes in the context of wider growth driven by metropolitan regions across the country.
Similarly, the Camden metropolitan region is attached at the hip to the Philadelphia metropolitan region. And the Philadelphia region came in at 3.0% job growth, third in the country. This is indicative of wider regional growth (and undermines the theory that Philly and Camden are engaged in a zero-sum game in which they compete for jobs –but that’s a post for another time).
This is not to say that policy has not effected Camden’s metro region, but just to say that its growth comes in the context of national and regional growth. But what about the claim that job growth is due to local policies?
Capelli and Norcross cite a host of different policies, from Promise Zone designation to changes in Camden schools to the Economic Opportunity Act. It’s important to remember the timing in many of these policies — it’s still early to see job results back from something like the Promise Zones (which is largely considered good policy) or the changes in education (some of those changes will be playing out over decades, not months). Even the Economic Opportunity Act likely has shown marginal long-term growth because most businesses were either 1) in the metropolitan region already [like Subaru] or 2) building new facilities which means jobs are still arriving during the time period studies [like Holtec]. But, that doesn’t mean we haven’t seen a an uptick in jobs. It’s just that these jobs have likely come in the construction sector, as new companies seek to build new facilities.
This begs one of the wider questions of the Economic Opportunity Act, particularly in light of the large future revenue given up by the state: does the Economic Opportunity Act involve a tradeoff between short-term construction jobs and long-term state budget solvency?
It wouldn’t be the first time a policy was fiscally unsound in the long-term, but contributed to a short-term blip of job growth. For politicians who may not be in office to handle the fiscal downsides of such a policy, that is a pretty good deal.
None of this changes the fact that the Camden metro region lead the country’s metropolitan regions in job growth. That’s fantastic news. It’s just to say that performance happened in the context of regional and national growth, and that it may have come at the expense of significant tax revenue. Such are the tradeoffs of the policies the state and South Jersey has pursued.
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