Big-city and small-town America have swapped places on jobs and business creation, according to a recent analysis by the bipartisan Economic Innovation Group in Washington D.C.
The Washington Post reports that counties with more than 1 million people added jobs twice as fast as the least populated counties from 2010 through 2014.
The largest counties continued to have a net increase of new businesses, while there was a net decrease of new businesses in the average low-population county.
That’s the complete opposite of what occurred in the 1990s when, following the 1991 recession, counties with 100,000 residents or fewer saw faster employment growth and more net new business formation than medium-, large- or mega-size counties.
The least-populated counties saw, on average, 16% employment growth in the first five years of the ‘90s recovery and business formation growth of 9%.
Both those rates are double what the largest counties of more than 1 million people experienced during that time.
But for counties today, “size matters now in a way that it didn’t in the early 1990s,” says John Lettieri, one of EIG’s co-founders. “In fact, it’s inverted.” The shift, says co-founder Steve Glickman, “means less and less people are able to take advantage of the recovery, and the people being left behind in communities have less and less tools to get out of it.”
