Our economy ranks among best in nation, study finds

Propelled partly by robust output of goods and services, Hampton Roads continued to rank among the country's

20 strongest-performing metropolitan areas, a research institution said Tuesday in a study of economic activity by region.

Among the 100 largest metro areas, the Virginia Beach-Norfolk-Newport News area ranked third when measured by the growth in output between the October-through-December quarter of 2008 and the comparable period in 2009, authors at the Brookings Institution in Washington said in the study.

The flow of federal funds, especially from the Defense Department, continued to provide crucial support for Hampton Roads' economy, said Howard Wial, an economist and co-author of Brookings' MetroMonitor study. Economic stimulus measures probably played a role as well, he said.

The quarterly study, which Washington-based Brookings began publishing in June, also takes into account job growth, unemployment, housing prices and home foreclosures to measure the economic performance of metro areas.

In Hampton Roads, the output of goods and services during the fourth quarter was up 2.9 percent from the year-earlier period. For the nation's 100 largest metro areas, the average was a 0.9 percent decline in output, according to the study.

Meanwhile, Hampton Roads generated a 0.4 percent increase in jobs between the quarter ended Sept. 30 and the one ended Dec. 31, the study said. That was the sixth-best performance among the metro areas studied by Brookings. The average for the metro areas in the study was a 0.4 percent loss of jobs.

Wial said the study's authors relied on year-end employment data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics that was available in late February. Since then, the bureau has been revising some job data as part of its annual benchmarking process. Changes in metro-area employment from this process could be significant but would show up in the next quarterly MetroMonitor, Wial said. He and co-author Alec Friedhoff called attention in the study to continued job erosion in most metro areas even as many saw growth in their output of goods and services.

"A lot of the output growth in the last quarter was due to inventory replenishment and economic stimulus," Wial, director of Brookings' Metropolitan Economy Initiative, said in an interview. It's not yet clear whether that growth will remain strong enough to spur continued growth in jobs, he said.

"The country is recovering much more slowly from this recession than it did from others over the past three decades," Wial said in a statement accompanying the study.

One sector where Hampton Roads compared poorly was housing. The region's home prices during the October-through-December quarter were down 7.4 percent from the year-earlier period. That was slightly worse than the average decline of 7.2 percent for the 100 largest metro areas.

In addition, the number of lender-owned properties per 1,000 mortgageable properties in Hampton Roads was 2.6, according to the Brookings study. That put the region in 50th place when ranked by percentage of foreclosed properties. The average for the 100 metro areas measured was 4.27 per thousand.