Augusta Stands out for its Growth

5/27/2010

Walter C. Jones, Morris News Service

The Augusta Chronicle

Augusta had the state's second-best economic growth rate in the first three months of the year and a forecast released Wednesday predicts it will keep that ranking throughout 2010.

In a state where the employment base shrank 3.4 percent in the first quarter, Augusta's 0.1 percent reduction looked good in comparison. Atlanta, for example, has the state's worst economy and will remain last for the balance of the year.

Augusta's loss of 296 jobs during the last quarter came mainly in manufacturing and construction, along with finance, wholesaling and hospitality.

"This figure was a significant improvement from the 8,500 and 5,600 job losses reported in the third and fourth quarters of 2009," notes the report from the Economic Forecasting Center at Georgia State University.

New jobs came from professional and business services, retail and government.

Overall improvement in Georgia's economy will boost Augusta's work force, too, by 1.1 percent in 2010, even though the state will be shedding jobs at about that rate.

The vitality of Georgia's fledgling economic recovery is being threatened by Greece's financial crisis, the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and a volcano in Iceland, according to Wednesday's forecast.

Rajeev Dhawan, the director of the Forecasting Center, described the threats in terms of fires. The volcano would be a single-alarm fire if smoke and ash ground flights over Europe for an extended period for its potential impact on the state's tourism and airline industries.

More serious is the possible three-alarm "fire" that's the oil spill, which could expand to a five-alarm blaze if it completely halts Gulf tourism and oil exploration, triggering more bankruptcies, which would be felt in Georgia as the leader of the Southeast region.

"But the fire with the biggest consequences is the one burning across the pond," Dhawan said.

Exports from Georgia to the countries that use the euro totaled $5.1 billion last year to account for 18 percent of the state's exports.

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