August 15, 2011
After getting my numbers wrong last time, I thought I would take one more look. Folks love to look at per capita GDP growth as a measure of economic progress. It’s certainly not everything, but it does tell you something.
So how does Texas look under Governor Perry compared to his predecessors? Using data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis (I had to chain these two series), I get that in the years 1987-2000 per capita GDP growth averaged 2.2 percent in the U.S. as a whole. In Texas it averaged 2.8 percent, a 0.6 percentage point gap. However, in the years 2000-2010 the gap goes the other way. Per capita GDP in the U.S. as a whole grew at an average rate of 0.6 percent, while it grew at a 0.5 percent rate in Texas, a difference of 0.1 percentage point in favor of the U.S.
Source: Bureau of Economic Analysis.
What does this say about Governor Perry’s success as the steward of the Texas economy? It doesn’t tell us much. There are all sorts of reasons that Texas’s per capita GDP growth might have slowed relative to the rest of the country that have nothing to do with the effectiveness of Perry’s policies. However, if we are looking for quick comparisons, per capita GDP growth is a common one, and it goes the wrong way for the Perry economic miracle story.
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