Dear friends and colleagues,
Today The Data Center is releasing the seventh in a series of reports we are calling The New Orleans Index at Ten Collection. This report is contributed by Richard Shearer, Amy Liu, Natalie Holmes, and John Ng of the Brookings Institution Metropolitan Policy Program.
Metro New Orleans’ post-Katrina economic growth has coincided with a sharp increase in the share of local workers who struggle to earn enough to support their families.
But this report finds that metro New Orleans offered 184,000 good jobs in 2014 that would put struggling workers on a path to stable jobs and higher wages. These “good jobs” are in a range of occupational fields, including health care, production, maintenance and repair, and business operations.
Notably a large portion of the region’s good jobs belong to traded industry clusters rather than local-serving clusters.
To build prosperity and expand opportunity to more New Orleans residents, local leaders should focus on growing more good jobs and connecting low- and middle-skilled workers to them. Findings from this report can help the New Orleans community, as it moves on from post-disaster recovery, overcome the challenge that many metropolitan areas face today: the need to build an economy that works for people.
Learn more by checking out The New Orleans Index at Ten Collection - Opportunity Clusters: Identifying Pathways to Good Jobs in Metro New Orleans at:
Bringing you the data you need to make informed decisions,
The Data Center team
Allison Plyer, Nihal Shrinath, Rebecca Osakwe, Caroline Heffernan, and Vicki Mack
