The Economic Impact of the Coronavirus on Indianapolis
This is just a short post with an update on how the coronavirus disruptions have been affecting the Indianapolis economy.
Coronavirus related shutdowns began in March and hit their peak impact in April. Between February and April of this year, the Indianapolis metro area lost 131,000 jobs — 11.9% of the total jobs in the region.
To put that in perspective, during the Great Recession, metro Indy lost 42,300 jobs between its peak in 2008 to its trough in 2010. So this was more than double the impact of the Great Recession.
Since then, the region has recovered a large share of those jobs — 84,000 of them. That still leaves the region down 47,000 from February, or about the same as the losses from the Great Recession.
But here’s the amazing thing, Indianapolis is actually one of the best performing metro areas on jobs in the country. From February to July, metro Indy ranked #2 in the entire country among large metro regions on its performance in limiting job losses. As bad as we got hit, other cities got hit way worse.
Just as one example, we lost 4.3% of our jobs, but New York City lost 14.5% of their — almost 1.5 million jobs.
Our employment situation is not good news. We still have a long way to go in recovering from coronavirus and much pain still to come. Our unemployment rate is still 10.6%, equal to the peak of the Great Recession. It will take a long time to recover from where we are today. But we could be in a much deeper hole than we currently are.
