As Metro Cleveland’s civic leadership seeks strategies to strengthen economic development, it is easy to fall into the trap of over-emphasizing favored industries and trumpeting positive news. While it is constructive to mobilize the business community and the public with aspirational visions, the most successful plans take advantage of real economic strength that is well documented with data and existing trends that can be amplified with focused effort.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) publishes a range of data that can be analyzed to assess the overall momentum of the metropolitan economy and suggest growth industries.
Unfortunately, the local economic development organizations do not provide regular analysis of the data to the public. One example is BLS’s Current Employment Statistics (CES), which uses business surveys of employment, earnings and hours to provide industry-specific data.
The chart below shows the growth of Metro Cleveland employment for a period from 2010 to 2023.
It’s not easy to select target industries. Economic development professionals typically look at many industry characteristics and consider philosophical objectives in developing their roster of target industries. The professionals would do well to add backward-looking data analysis to their forward-looking projections. They should add more analysis of existing Current Employment Statistics data to identify strategic industries that have consistent, positive local employment growth over a reasonable length of time. To assess an industry’s potential contribution to a sound, long-term strategy, one needs to know how important a sector and a specific industry are to the local economy.
Overall, employment has grown by only 9% since 2010, and the modest growth includes a large number of part-time jobs. The sectoral data shows transportation and utilities, construction and wholesale trade have grown consistently for over a decade but are only moderate-size sectors. The leisure and hospitality and professional/business services sectors are large sectors, but growth has been inconsistent over the period.
Manufacturing, which many regard as fundamental to the local economy, has been below average in growth. Retail trade and other services have contracted, undoubtedly because of the many social and technological changes affecting consumers. The small information technology sector is unexpectedly at the bottom of the chart and may represent a statistical anomaly.
While sectoral analysis can provide useful context, it is not sufficient to underpin strategy development. A more detailed understanding of employment growth by specific industries is essential to allow one to assess how important an industry’s growth would be to the community’s future.
Consistent growth is also an important metric for good economic development strategies. A high-potential industry would have recovered well from the 2008-2010 recession from 2010 to 2019 and from the technological/social/financial/COVID disruptions from 2019 to 2023. An industry with poor potential would have had a lagging 2010-2019 rebound as well as weak post-COVID performance.
