Governor Mike DeWine’s State of the State speech last week offered an optimistic view of Ohio. Echoing a line from Bengals star Joe Burrow, Mr. DeWine told the general assembly that Ohio “comes for everything.” The governor has given lawmakers solid encouragement, and his optimism is well-placed and contagious.
After decades of struggling to adapt to a changing global marketplace riddled with automation, foreign competition, and deindustrialization, Ohio is amassing its fair share of success stories. Multinationals like Intel are investing in the state, and economic sunshine is shining through the post-pandemic clouds.
But getting Ohio’s economy from where it is today to where Mr. DeWine wants it to be tomorrow will require more work. And the state should work smarter, not harder, as the old adage goes, by making better policy decisions that propel Ohio into the 21st century economy.
Ohio’s economic struggles are well documented. In 2018, the Brookings Institution evaluated 70 older industrial cities across the country, ranking them as Strong, Emerging, Stabilizing and Vulnerable. Nationally, more than half of cities were rated as strong or emerging, but less than a quarter of Ohio’s rated cities could say the same.
A March 2022 report by the Economic Innovation Group lamented Ohio as a state that “demonstrates the false promise of economic ‘stability’ based on low emigration and low rates of change.” And the Buckeye Institute has regrettably shown how failures in state and local policy have left Ohio unresponsive to market changes, even as other cities in the Carolinas, Pennsylvania, Iowa and Utah have adapted and thrived more shrewdly.
Fortunately, the political missteps that have bound Ohio can be corrected.
Outdated professional licensing laws, for example, have stifled labor markets with regulatory bottlenecks and widened the gap between employer requirements and workers’ skills. These outdated laws and regulations reduce flexibility for workers and businesses, make it harder for professionals licensed in other states to apply their skills here, contribute to labor shortages, and slow Ohio’s already anemic population growth — all of which have cost the state the economic benefits of specialization. Two bills currently pending in the General Assembly would update these laws, making it easier for employers to hire staff, attract labor from abroad, and provide goods and services more reliably and affordably. That is a beginning.
Policymakers should also make other structural changes to reform how Ohio trains, upskills, upskills and reskills its workforce. For example, the state should change its funding for post-high school education to reflect outcome-based metrics such as loan repayment rates, debt-to-income ratio, graduation, and post-graduation employment. And micro-credentialing programs modeled on Ohio’s TechCred program — which sponsors companies that invest in their workforce and help their employees earn short-term degrees or job certifications — should be expanded and made more available.
Finally, Ohio should explore working with Washington policymakers to create a state visa program that would give the state more say in attracting highly skilled immigrants who tend to be entrepreneurial and inventive. Attracting a talented international workforce will help fuel declining population growth and is also likely to encourage more foreign investment, both of which are powerful catalysts for economic growth.
Ohio isn’t where it needs to be yet, but Mr. DeWine has good reason for his lively optimism. And by correcting past mistakes and making better economic policy decisions, Ohio could soon “come for anything.”
Logan Kolas is an economic policy analyst at the Buckeye Institute’s Economic Research Center and the author of Policy Solutions for More Innovation: Modernizing Ohio’s Policies to Seize New Economic Opportunities.
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