Las Vegas has taken a baby step toward improving its standing in the global economy, a new analysis says.
In a Brookings Institution study ranking the performance of the world’s 200 largest metro areas, Las Vegas came in at No. 179 for 2010-2011.
That may not be worth bragging about, but at least it’s up from Las Vegas’s No. 199 showing for 2007-2010.
The improvement came not from Las Vegas suddenly diversifying its economy or improving its schools — tasks the Brookings Institution has urged Las Vegas to take on — but because the community reversed a trend of job losses and posted a 0.1 percent gain in employment, the Brookings Institution said. That gain compares to a 9.2 percent decline in employment locally between 2007 and 2010.
The Las Vegas unemployment rate in November was 12.5 percent, down from 14.9 percent in November 2010. Economic conditions began to stabilize in 2011, tourism and gaming picked up and steep declines in construction employment seemed to have ended.
At the same time, Las Vegas’s ranking improved as several other cities in the analysis were slammed by the European debt crisis and the 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan. Athens came in last at No. 200, and three Japanese cities were ranked in the bottom 20.
The new ranking indicates Las Vegas still has a ways to go to be a worldwide star, like it used to be.
The city was ranked 18th worldwide between 1993 and 2007, a period marked by several economic booms in Southern Nevada.
The Brookings Institution’s Metropolitan Policy Program, in a report highlighting rising metro stars around the world called Global MetroMonitor, found 90 percent of the world’s fastest-growing metropolitan economies are now located outside North America and Western Europe. Many are involved in high-value economic activities such as manufacturing and exporting.
The top performer was Shanghai, which registered employment growth of 5.8 percent between 2010 and 2011.
Just four metro areas in North America and Western Europe — Houston, Dallas, Stuttgart and Stockholm — ranked among the 40 strongest economies in 2010-2011, Brookings said.
“These developed metro economies exhibited a healthy diversity that buoyed their recent performance relative to regional peers, including expansion in high-value commodities, manufacturing and business and financial services sectors,” the report says.
The Global MetroMonitor report says Las Vegas and many other cities at the lower end of the performance scale suffered from the housing bubble that saw home prices soar and then collapse to the point where an estimated 63 percent of Las Vegas homeowners are now underwater, with negative equity.
“The weakest-performing U.S. metro areas reflected a mix of places hamstrung by poor housing market conditions (e.g., Riverside, Las Vegas, Atlanta), dependent on trade with fragile European partners (e.g., Indianapolis, Philadelphia), and concentrated in state government services that faced steep cuts in 2011 (e.g., Richmond and Sacramento),” the Brookings report said.
For better than a decade, policymakers have heard calls that the Las Vegas and Nevada economies needed to be diversified, that schools needed to be better funded and that manufacturing needed to be beefed up. Little was done in Nevada about these concerns, though another arm of the Brookings Institution issued a lengthy study in November that tackled these subjects and is now seen as a blueprint for diversifying the economy.
But perhaps surprisingly, despite its shortcomings, Las Vegas ranks ahead of several U.S. cities in the new Brookings analysis.
Those trailing Las Vegas are Indianapolis, New Orleans, San Francisco, Atlanta, Kansas City, Richmond and Sacramento.
However, perennial competitors for business and industry with Las Vegas rank higher in the report including Riverside, Calif., at No. 170; Los Angeles, 146; Phoenix, 143; San Diego, 125; and Salt Lake City, 80.