by Mark Basch, Daily Record
Florida’s real estate industry is generating less of the state’s economy than it did before the recession, but it is still by far the state’s biggest private industry.
A report on the state gross domestic product was released last month by the Florida Legislature’s Office of Economic and Demographic Research.
While the private sector slowed down, government accounted for 12.9 percent of Florida’s total economy in 2011, up from 10.5 percent in 2006.
That made government Florida’s second-largest industry behind real estate, which accounted for 15.6 percent of the state’s GDP in 2011.
However, real estate’s share of the GDP dropped from 16.8 percent in 2006.
That’s because the output for real estate and rental and leasing fell by 1.19 percent a year from 2006 through 2011 to $117.4 billion.
Not surprisingly, the only sector to record a sharper decline was the related industry of construction, which dropped by 14.5 percent a year over the five years.
Construction’s share of the state’s overall GDP fell from 7.7 percent in 2006 to 4 percent in 2011.
The report also shows that, despite efforts to reduce the size of government, the government sector has been a growth engine for the state since 2006, while the private sector’s output has been basically flat.
The office is the Legislature’s research arm that forecasts economic and social trends that affect policymaking, revenues and appropriations.
It analyzed statistics from the U.S. Department of Commerce Bureau of Economic Analysis. Florida’s GDP is the sum of all the goods and services produced in the state.
Florida’s total GDP rose by 0.77 percent per year from 2006 through 2011 to $754.3 billion in current dollars, the report shows.
That was helped by 6.01 percent annual growth in government output to $97.3 billion in 2011.
The private sector grew by only 0.1 percent a year over the five-year period.
The report does not break down the government output by federal, state and local sources.
The biggest private-sector growth industry was health care and social assistance, which rose by 6.4 percent a year to $66.3 billion in 2011.
The industry accounted for 8.8 percent of the state’s GDP in 2011, up from 7.1 percent in 2006.
The industry-by-industry trends in Florida are similar in many ways to the nation as a whole, although government surpassed real estate as the largest sector nationwide with 12.6 percent of total output in 2011.
The one significant difference between Florida and the rest of the country is that Florida has a smaller manufacturing base.
Manufacturing’s share of the economy was basically unchanged nationally and in Florida over the five years, but manufacturing still accounted for 12.3 percent of the nation’s GDP in 2011, while manufacturing only produced 5.1 percent of Florida’s state GDP.