Students looking for work during school breaks or when they graduate may want to stay just where they are.
While other cities around the country are just now beginning to recover from the recession, Baton Rouge is among the best-performing metro areas in the country, according to several reports.
The Baton Rouge Area Chamber’s 2011 economic forecast predicts Baton Rouge will see a job growth between 0.9 and 2.0 percent, according to a news release.
BRAC, in collaboration with the Greater Baton Rouge Business Report, also recently conducted a survey of local business owners that shows remarkable signs of optimism in the country’s difficult economic climate.
Of the survey respondents, 46 percent believe the region will experience moderate to rapid growth in 2011, and 70 percent believe their company will experience at least moderate growth in the coming year.
In terms of jobs, 43 percent of the survey participants think their business will increase employment in 2011.
The Brookings Institution, a nonpartisan, Washington, D.C.-based research center, has consistently ranked Baton Rouge among its top 20 strongest-performing metro areas during the recession.
Charles D’Agostino, executive director of the Louisiana Business and Technology Center, a small business incubator run by the University, said while Baton Rouge has done well in the recession, there is a lot of room for improvement.
“Baton Rouge has really fared well — in fact much, much better than a lot of the other communities,” D’Agostino said. “With all the innovation going on at the University and in the community, the small business sector is doing relatively well.”
Some painful events from the city’s recent past may have helped its future, D’Agostino said.
“We’re still spending dollars from the Katrina, Rita and Gustav storms and the oil spill … so that’s kind of carried us through some of the bad times,” D’Agostino said.
D’Agostino said the city has several key things to focus on if it wants to get its economy moving forward strongly.
“We’ve got to get the construction industry moving again. We’ve got to do something about keeping the University students here upon graduation,” D’Agostino said. “But with us doing better than some of the other communities, I think certainly there may be more job opportunities here.”
 
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Contact Frederick Holl at [email protected]