For economic performance in 2011, Atlanta ranks 189 on list of 200 world metro areas

From the AJC’s Atlanta’s global economic standing: #189:

Atlanta’s economy – primarily its employment and income gains over the last year – were so anemic that the city came in at No. 189 in the think tank’s list of top 200 global performers. Atlanta shares a particularly déclassé neighborhood filled with the likes of Richmond (No. 191), Madrid (195) and Athens (200).

Still, Brookings discovered that “the most rapidly growing metropolitan economies lie outside the U.S. and Western Europe” in its report released Wednesday. The 200 cities represent 14 percent of the world’s population, but half its economy.

“Large, mature metro economies like Tokyo, New York, and London still have a lot of firepower, but high-performance metros like Shanghai, Istanbul, and Santiago continued to close the gap last year,” said Emilia Istrate, a senior research analyst at Brookings. “To succeed, slower-growing metro areas must strengthen their relationships with these rising metro markets.”

A 4-minute video from Brookings talking about the methodology:

And an excerpt from the full report:

Now, I don’t think we should make TOO much of this, but this ranking should be alarming and at the same time unsurprising. The Georgia economy as a whole is largely dependent on the health of metro Atlanta, which has lost jobs over the last year and has seen plummeting home prices in the most recent data. Many of the problems stem in part from poor decisions by state government, which has never in my time in Georgia recognized the importance of metro Atlanta’s health to the overall economic climate of the state.