91.5 Chapel Hill 88.9 Manteo 90.9 Rocky Mount 91.1 Welcome 91.9 Fayetteville 90.5 Buxton 94.1 Lumberton 99.9 Southern Pines 89.9 Chadbourn

NC Job Growth Limited to Metro Areas

North Carolina’s metropolitan areas show some positive momentum in the jobs front. But three areas in the state lag behind the rest.

Almost 100-percent of the job growth in North Carolina since the end of the recession in 2009 has occurred in the state’s metropolitan areas.   And Allan Fryer, a policy analyst with the North Carolina Budget and Tax Center says 90-percent of the job growth has occurred in only three metro areas – Raleigh, Charlotte and Durham.

Allan Fryer:  "Overall the state saw an average of three percent job growth over the last year but Fayetteville and Wilmington just saw an employment growth rate of two-tenths of a percent and Winston-Salem actually fell further behind."

Fryer says Winston-Salem lost jobs in the last year.  The latest figures show the number of North Carolina workers employed in November dropped by 22-thousand people.

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Leoneda Inge is the co-host of WUNC's "Due South." Leoneda has been a radio journalist for more than 30 years, spending most of her career at WUNC as the Race and Southern Culture reporter. Leoneda’s work includes stories of race, slavery, memory and monuments. She has won "Gracie" awards, an Alfred I. duPont Award and several awards from the Radio, Television, Digital News Association (RTDNA). In 2017, Leoneda was named "Journalist of Distinction" by the National Association of Black Journalists.
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