The D.C. area ranks fourth out of 363 U.S. metropolitan areas in its number and quality of jobs and contributes 2.8 percent of the country’s gross domestic product, according to a study released Monday by the Brookings Institution.
The three higher-ranking regions are the New York metro area, the Los Angeles metro area and the Chicago area.
The think tank presented the study as part of its “Blueprint for American Prosperity,” an initiative aimed at keeping America competitive by encouraging the federal government to empower individual metropolitan economies instead of maintaining a blanket focus on states and cities.
Among the D.C. region’s many strengths are its level of research and development and the amount of venture capital investment in the area, according to the study, which was based on analysis of 2005 data.
For every 1,000 workers, the D.C. area has 17.4 engaged in research and development — 425 percent of the national average. The National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health fund scientists in the D.C. region at a rate of $320 per capita, which is 190 percent of the U.S. average.
Venture capitalists also pour about twice as much money, or $177 per person, into the region as they do on average in the rest of the nation. This is despite the fact that D.C. lags in intellectual property; the region had only about 17.6 patents per 100,000 people in 2005, about 70 percent of the national average.
But John McClain, a researcher at the George Mason Center for Regional Analysis, cautioned against complacency. AOL merged with Time Warner and then moved from Loudoun County to New York, he pointed out, and Nextel was bought out by Sprint.
“We’ve lost some of the local companies that are on the leading edge of technology,” McClain said.
McClain said the region is too dependent on federal government outsourcing and vulnerable to changes in federal outsourcing policies.
“As a metropolitan economic development strategy, we ought to be doing some things to help some of those companies start selling to other parts of the economy,” he said.
