Team NEO Releases Quarterly Report

Thursday, January 24, 2008
Topics: Economy
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One regional marketing group is trying to break through the gloomy economic news with a new report on jobs and employment. ideastream®'s Tasha Flournoy has more.

The report from Team NEO shows that employment levels steadily improved throughout last year, and that higher paying jobs within finance and engineering are seeing the most growth.  Team NEO CEO Tom Waltermire says that’s a good sign for the region’s economy. 

Tom Waltermire: The value of the work that we’re doing is going up. We’re not devaluing the work that we do here. We have this image in our mind that manufacturing production work is going down, and so somehow the region is getting poorer, which is not true.

Taking a longer term view, Waltermire says the economy for our 16-county region has grown 31 percent since 1992.

Economist Zionia Austrian agrees the economy is growing, but at a much slower rate than the nation.  Austrian, who heads up the Economic Development Center at Cleveland State University, says Northeast Ohio still has some catching up to do.

Zionia Austrian: Actually Northeast Ohio we began our growth only in the past 2 or 3 years. So when you look at our growth over the last 15 years, we are growing, but we’re lagging.

Other reports released this week reveal some bright spots in Northeast Ohio.  Last year, healthcare startups raised a record total of 242 million dollars from venture capitalists. That’s triple the money raised in 2006, according to a report by BioEnterprise, a bioscience company developer.  The region received a total of 318 million dollars in venture capital investments in 2007.

Tasha Flournoy, 90.3.

Additional Information

www.teamneo.org