Darker Days Ahead For Sunbelt Economy?

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America's "Sunbelt," the land of opportunity for job seekers and businessmen, is beginning to experience the unemployment and high cost of living that plague other parts of the United States.

Demographics experts report a significant change in the type of migrants coming to the southern and southwestern states. During the 1970s they were mostly professionals and skilled blue-collar workers whose services were needed in the South's fast-growing industrial regions. In the 1980s, however, these migrants are primarily people who have lost their jobs in industrial midwestern states and whose training in inappropriate for the available jobs. As one Texas labor specialist puts it: "The area is not a land of milk and honey if you don't have any skills."

At the same time, the economy of the Sunbelt is no longer as appealing to businessmen as it once was. Taxes are rising, the costs of living and doing business are increasing, cities are more congested, and services are becoming more strained. "What's happening," says Bernard Weinstein, an economist at the University of Texas at Dallas, "is that the low-cost regions of the country are beginning to catch up to the high-cost regions, and the whole nation is becoming more homogeneous."

Weinstein claims, however, that significant opportunities for businessmen still exist in the Sunbelt. The most promising industries in the next decade, he says, range from metal-working machinery, printing machines, and oil-field machinery to machine-tool accessories, electronic components, and transportation equipment. "The real action during the 1980s," he adds, will be in the Mountain states, including Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, and Montana.

Meanwhile, a survey by A.T. Kearney Inc., Management consultants in Chicago, reports that hourly manufacturing wages in the North will continue to outpace those in the Sunbelt.

In 1980, northern workers earned an average of $8.49 per hour compared with $5.77 for those in the South, a difference of $2.72, the study says. Five years earlier, the gap was only $1.80, an average of $5.51 per hour in the northern group of states compared with $3.71 in the South.