Southeastern Pennsylvania can reap the economic benefits if it works together | Editorial
With more than four million people living in the five counties, the region has the resources it needs to invest in itself.
If the Philadelphia region wants to live up to its economic potential, Southeastern Pennsylvania needs to set aside its siloed approach to doing business and come together to provide the kind of job opportunities area residents deserve.
That’s one of the lessons to be drawn from a new report from the Brookings Institution, which found that out of the 50 largest metro areas in America, Philadelphia provided the least upward mobility for workers.
If the Philadelphia region’s growth matched that of our peer metropolitan areas like Boston and Atlanta, the region could have added about 188,000 jobs — including 70,000 of what Brookings calls “high opportunity” jobs engaged in the national or global economy — between 2013 and 2023.
In all, the report found, the region gained about 382,000 jobs in the decade from 2013 to 2023. While that is an improvement over the kind of declines that defined Philadelphia for decades, it shows the city, and the region, continue to lag.
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That’s because Greater Philadelphia’s economy is heavily based on jobs that experts refer to as “non-tradeable,” or locally serving.
That means instead of serving the national or global economy, Philadelphians mostly work in industries that involve exchanging goods and services with businesses and individuals that are already in the region, like healthcare and hospitality.
This leads to a job mix that looks more like a retirement community than the onetime “workshop of the world.”
It also means that both Philadelphians and residents of the suburban counties are earning less money than they could be — but it doesn’t have to be that way.
Per Brookings, Philadelphia has three main areas of opportunity as a region. One is what it calls enterprise digital solutions (think business software), another is in specialized manufacturing, and the third is in life sciences — where the regional edge in gene therapy could be used to grow other sections of the industry.
Capitalizing on those opportunities would take regional collaboration, since no county can do it alone, and relying on the state isn’t a good plan, either.
As the three-year odyssey to fund public transportation has shown, Harrisburg often has vastly different priorities than what is best for the southeast. Despite generating roughly 40% of the commonwealth’s revenue on just 5% of Pennsylvania’s land, the region’s needs often get short shrift.
Meanwhile, agriculture and energy, two industries that are mostly irrelevant in this part of the state, receive lavish attention from policymakers. Rural Pennsylvania is also allowed to keep the nearly $3 billion in revenue from impact fees generated by natural gas producers, while $6 billion generated by casinos, which are mostly in or near urban areas, is nearly entirely absorbed by the commonwealth.
This neglect from the state should spur the southeast to work together in both the public and private sectors. Given how integrated our local economies are, our fates are intertwined, yet according to Brookings, “the region lacks a unified, tactics-level strategy and workplan to guide economic and workforce development efforts.”
That must change. With more than four million people living in the five counties, the region has the resources it needs to invest in itself; it just needs the political will to do it.
Brookings, working alongside the Pew Charitable Trusts and the Chamber of Commerce, helped to establish what it is calling the Southeastern Pennsylvania Economic Collaborative to help address growth and mobility. The group seeks to outline a workable strategy for economic development, which would help entrepreneurs and other investors find a reason to bet on Greater Philadelphia.