Building an Economy for Quality Jobs

For some time, Oregon’s overriding economic goal has been to increase and maintain high-wage jobs that support families and maintain strong communities. Key measures of success are per capita income relative to the national average, reduction in poverty, and statewide job stability.

High-wage jobs are created primarily by traded-sector industries. These industries sell their goods and services outside Oregon, bringing in new dollars that are spent on employee wages local suppliers. This, in turn, helps sustain local economies.

Natural resource industries, particularly forest products, were once Oregon’s dominant traded-sector employers, and they had a large role in supporting family-wage jobs and strong communities. That changed in the early 1980s when the forest products industry in Oregon encountered tougher out-of-state competition, market demand for lower cost substitute products, and supply constraints that forced it to drastically downsize and restructure. Although still important, natural resources are no longer a mainstay of Oregon’s economy.

In the early 1990s, new industries emerged to create high-wage jobs, most notably in high technology. Today, Oregon faces two main challenges. It must continue to build up its traded-sector industries, and it must find ways to include more Oregonians in the prosperity that results. The past decade, despite our successes, per capita income has been falling, poverty has been rising, and Oregon’s rural areas have had higher unemployment.

Oregon’s Economy Today

Many traded-sector industries

Oregon now has many sectors driving its economy, not just one or two dominant industries.

Regional flavors

Oregon is now a set of regional economies, not a single statewide economy. Four factors characterize a regional view of Oregon:

• Different parts of Oregon have distinctive economies reflecting the locational preferences of various industry clusters.
• Declining pay is the chief economic problem of rural regions. All of the regions outside the Willamette Valley have lower average wage levels today, adjusted for inflation, than in 1976. Northwest Oregon wages are up 20 percent.
• Regional pay differentials closely correlate with variations in educational attainment—rural areas have far fewer highly educated workers as a fraction of their population than does the Portland metropolitan area.
• No region has failed to create jobs. Every region has more jobs than in 1976; growth rates in lagging regions (Eastern Oregon, Coos-Curry-Douglas) have been a third to 40 percent of the state average. Southern and Central Oregon are growing faster than the rest of the state.

Blurring distinctions

Oregon’s industries now defy traditional definitions, and the distinction between high-tech and low-tech business is not as clear as it once was. In every sector, there are substantial, and continuing changes in technology, markets, and competition. Firms that have been most successful in Oregon in every industry have been those that have developed new and more efficient production techniques and better products, ranging from engineered wood trusses to high-yield farm crops to more efficient trucks to faster semiconductors.

Back to the framework of the Oregon Business Plan.

View the initiatives for the Oregon Business Plan.

Download the policy documents for the Oregon Business Plan.

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