Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, October 1, 1994 TAG: 9410030045
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-9 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Indeed, the rise of metro areas and economically knit regions as trading centers and competitive rivals has made the notion of local economies more valid than the idea of state economies.
To talk of a distinctive Virginia vs. a distinctive North Carolina economy makes less sense in many ways than to talk of a distinctive economy of Washington, D.C., and its suburbs, including those in Northern Virginia; an economy of Raleigh-Durham; of Tidewater; of Charlotte and its environs; of the Roanoke region, and so on.
Not nations or states but regions are becoming the principal units of the global economy.
And so, as the University of Virginia's John Knapp observes in a recent News Letter of UVa's Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service, average statewide data often used to describe a Virginia economy mainly describe only the two or three numerically dominant local economies: Northern Virginia, Hampton Roads and, to some extent, the Richmond region.
In 1992, the three (of 21 statewide) planning districts for those regions had 60 percent of the state's population, 63 percent of its employed workers and 67 percent of its personal income. (Knapp uses Virginia's planning districts as an imperfect but useful way to define the boundaries of Virginia's local economies.)
No wonder information about the Roanoke Valley (4 percent of the state's population) or New River Valley (2.4 percent) gets overwhelmed in state averages.
While it may be useful to know that 5.5 percent of Virginia's employment in 1992 was military, how far does that fact go toward accurately describing economic reality in Virginia? The information that nearly 16 percent of the work force in Hampton Roads was military, but less than 1 percent in the Roanoke Valley, surely does a better job. Hampton Roads and the Roanoke Valley may be parts of a "Virginia economy," but their economies are in many respects miles apart.
Geographic distance, of course, isn't a prerequisite for distinctiveness between local economies. By the numbers, anyway, the respective economies of the adjoining Roanoke and New River valleys seem quite different.
In 1990, 15.5 percent of the population of the Roanoke-based Fifth Planning District was 65 or older, compared to only 11.2 percent of the population in the New River Valley Planning District. In 1992, the Fifth had 4.4 percent of Virginia's employment, with only 4.0 percent of state population, while the New River Valley had only 2.0 percent of commonwealth employment with 2.4 percent of its population.
Also in 1992, per-capita personal income in the Fifth was $20,127, putting it fourth among Virginia's 21 planning districts; per-capita personal income in the New River Valley was $13,944, putting it last. More than 22 percent of the New River work force was employed by state and local government; only 8.3 percent in Roanoke's Fifth Planning District.
There's no mystery about one of the major reasons for such differences: the presence of tens of thousands of college students in the New River Valley, and relatively small numbers of same in the Roanoke Valley.
The question, still, is how long the two valleys will continue to be considered separate local economies. The divergences dovetail too neatly; the profiles of the two economies look too much like jigsaw-puzzle pieces, ready to link into a pleasing whole.
by CNB