Idaho skated through the national recession barely slowing its dynamic economic expansion, and government analysts see the state ready to build a new head of financial steam.
"Idaho is in a position few other states are," Gov. Cecil Andrus said recently."The home of one of the nation's strongest economies," Andrus said, "has succeeded in refusing to participate in the nation's recession."
And the latest economic forecast from the Division of Financial Management underscored the governor's contention.
While hundreds of thousands of jobs disappeared across the country over the past year, Idaho employers were expanding job opportunities at a 3 percent clip. Total personal income climbed by more than 5 percent, and the average annual wage for Idaho workers topped $20,000 for the first time.
"Idaho has had one of the nation's strongest economies during the recession," analysts said in the just-released forecast. "And Idaho's economy is expected to remain stronger than the national economy even as the nation recovers from the recession."
Even the trouble spots of timber and mining, which have been hard hit by regional, national and international forces over the past year, appeared to be stabilizing and beginning to rebound modestly.
The forecast showed agriculture receding significantly from last year's record $877 million in farm income, a key to Idaho's strong performance as recession gripped the rest of the country. But analysts said the retreat to below $700 million a year though 1993 simply reflects a more sustainable profit picture.
"This decline is more accurately defined as this industry's return to a more normal performance level after hitting lofty highs," they said, "rather than a return to the farm crisis conditions that ravaged this industry in the mid-1980s."
By nearly every other measure, the new outlook charts a bright economic course through 1993 for a state that has already been among the national leaders in job production and income growth.
And the first dividends from that surge may have already been paid. State tax revenues during September were much stronger than economists expected, pushing cumulative collections beyond projections for the first time since last January. Personal income taxes, an indicator of employment strength, and sale taxes, a sign of consumer confidence, anchored the collection increase that renewed optimism that the treasury could see its fourth cash surplus in the last five years.
With the number of Idahoans on the job at or near record levels this summer and early fall, the forecast projected off-farm employment to continue expanding at a rate of about 11,000 new jobs a year through 1993. For the first time, more than 400,000 people will be working outside agriculture by the end of this year.
The vast majority of those new jobs will be in the non-manufacturing sector, which provides four of every five non-farm jobs in Idaho. Over half are in the traditionally lower-paying service and retail sectors where tourism is driving expansion.
But unusually strong employment growth was anticipated in several manufacturing areas that generally offer higher wages. The state's high-technology electronics companies were expected to post annual employment growth in excess of 4 percent over the next two years.
And construction jobs, spurred by population growth at nearly twice the national rate, hit 20,000 for the first time ever this year and will continue rising in the coming years as demand for housing climbs to its highest levels since the boom years of the late 1970s.
That kind of escalation kept the increase in total personal income above the inflation rate this year and should create substantial increases in real consumer spending power in 1992 and 1993.
The state's average annual wage, which totaled $21,000 this fall, finally began gaining back the ground it lost to the national average wage during the 1980s when the country was enjoying a record economic expansion while Idaho suffered through one of its worst downturns ever.