• By CARL REDMAN
• Advocate executive editor
• Published: Jan 4, 2009 - UPDATED: 12:05 a.m.

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Out with the old, in with the new. The trouble is that as 2008 clicked over to 2009, the new Louisiana looks a lot like the old one.
The most-recent population estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau illustrate the point.

For more than two decades, Louisiana has hemorrhaged its young people to other states offering much-greater opportunities. Louisiana’s population grew very slowly, and only because births outnumbered deaths and the net loss to migration most years.
Then, along came hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2005, and the evacuation of tens of thousands more people from Louisiana exacerbated the situation.

In the years since the storms, Louisiana’s migration situation has improved, but only because evacuees continued finding their way home.

And it appears the return is slowing.

Census data released last month indicate Louisiana’s population increased by nearly 130,000 people between July 2006 and July 2007 but by only about 37,500 for July 2007 to July 2008.

Perhaps it’s too early to say definitively, but it appears Louisiana may be headed towards its pre-Katrina pattern of seeing more people move elsewhere from here than move here from elsewhere.

Other data also suggest Louisiana has not broken from its past.

In the two-plus years since the 2005 storms, Louisiana’s economy appeared to do quite well relative to the nation and to its own anemic performance prior to the storms.

But the latest estimates from the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis indicate Louisiana is slipping back to its traditional place near the bottom of the states in terms of economic vitality.

While total personal income — a common indicator of economic growth — grew by 3.7 percent nationally from the third quarter of 2007 to the third quarter of 2008, it grew by only 2.5 percent in Louisiana.

During that period, many other Southern states far outgained Louisiana in personal income growth. Even Mississippi had better growth at 2.9 percent.

And BEA and state labor data indicate much of Louisiana’s economic growth of the past few years has been linked to hurricane recovery spending or to the recently deflated oil and gas bubble.

The Louisiana Workforce Commission — formerly the state Department of Labor — estimated the state’s total nonfarm employment at 1,957,300 in November. That’s 34,100 more than a similar estimate from November 2004 — before hurricanes Katrina and Rita hit.
Over that four-year period, the stronger job growth has been in construction, professional business services which include construction-related architecture/engineering services, health services, and, to a lesser extent, support for the oil and gas industry.
Last month, the Council for a Better Louisiana, a nonprofit, nonpartisan public-policy research organization, released its latest “Louisiana Fact Book” taking stock of where the state is.