Personal income in the Spokane metropolitan area, though still lagging national benchmarks, grew at a faster rate last year than in the Seattle, Boise, and Portland markets, and also grew faster than the U.S. average, recently released data show.

Defined as the income received from all sources by all persons, personal income climbed 3.8 percent in the Spokane metropolitan statistical area (MSA) in 2008, compared with a growth rate of 3.6 percent in Seattle, 3.4 percent in Portland, and 0.1 percent in Boise. The average growth for all U.S. metropolitan areas was 3.3 percent, statistics released by the federal Bureau of Economic Analysis show. Beating Spokane handily was the Tri-Cities MSA, where personal income grow 6.6 percent.

On a per-capita income basis, which is personal income divided by population, Spokane's growth rate still beat Seattle, Boise, Portland, and the U.S. average of MSAs, but not the Tri-Cities, the federal data show.

Using preliminary 2008 numbers, the federal agency also says per-capita income grew 2.3 percent here in 2008, compared with 2.2 percent in Seattle and 1.5 percent in Portland.

Per-capita income in Boise fell by 1.2 percent in 2008, while the Tri-Cities, whose economy is fueled partly by federal allocations to the Hanford nuclear site and federal research lab, showed a Northwest-leading gain in personal income of 3 percent, the preliminary data show.

"Per-capita personal income in Spokane is below the national average, and this has caused a lot of soul-searching around here. When you see news like this, where Spokane outperformed its regional peers, it makes me stand up and take notice," says Patrick Jones, executive director of Eastern Washington University's Institute for Public Policy and Economic Analysis.

Jones says the comparison of Spokane's personal income with that of the Boise area is especially interesting given that "Boise has been held up as an example" of what Spokane should be.

Boise's economy has surged in recent decades as its technology sector grew, but in the past couple of years has suffered from layoffs in that sector.

"That doesn't surprise me," says Grant Forsyth, an economics professor at EWU, "because Boise kind of got hammered."

Still, Forsyth warns that it's too early to put much weight in the recent personal income numbers because other areas might have slipped into recession faster than the Spokane area, so Spokane's numbers for 2009 might not be as rosy.

"We were lagging the U.S. economy a little bit in 2008, so our numbers don't look quite as bad as other areas of the country," Forsyth says. "We were still experiencing some positive growth while others weren't. I think we have to wait for the '09 numbers" to see how meaningful the comparison is.

Jones believes the Spokane market has fared better than others because it isn't dependent on any one industry. "It does show the virtues of a diversified economy," he says.

Spokane's economy, which in the 1970s was driven partly by the strong manufacturing employment at Kaiser Aluminum & Chemical Corp., "has shifted away from larger companies to a very small-business economy," Jones says.

Forsyth says one of the reasons Spokane might not have been affected by the recession as severely as other regions, at least so far, is that its housing market wasn't inflated as in other markets before the economy swooned, and it doesn't have a big connection with the auto industry, which was been crippled in the downturn.