Patrick Jones, who heads the Eastern Washington University Community Indicators Project, sent this our way. A University of California Berkeley economics institute has developed what it calls a “resilience capacity index,” and it applied the index to cities across the country.

The full report can be found here.

The RCI ranks metros based on a set of factors that reportedly determines a given area's ability to bounce back or recover from economic stresses.  If you look at the jump on this post, you can read the geeky insider stuff on how they measure one ranked metro versus all others.

The bottom line: Spokane does fairly well, ranking No. 85 out of 361 U.S. metros.

Ahead of Spokane from the Northwest are: Seattle at 25; Idaho Falls, 44; Kennewick, 71; BIllings, 75; Bend, 84. Behind Spokane:  Boise, at No. 115.

The SR business pages later this week will take a deeper dive on the RCI and take a look at how accurately it tracks what it says it does.

  

The tough economy continues grinding on, based on new data looking at the gross domestic product (GDP) of 366 U.S. metros in 2009. 

Notably, 80 percent of those cities, Spokane not included, saw an economic decline compared with 2008, according to numbers published Wednesday by the Bureau of Economic Analysis.

That growth is not adjusted for inflation. If adjusted, Spokane's economy sagged, like most of the rest of the nation.

But overall, Spokane's performance was generally better than about 80 percent of the rest of urban America, according to the BEA data. Based on comparative numbers, Spokane ranked No. 108 with a GDP of 17,720 or a gain of just one-tenth of a percent from the year before.

The GDP measures economic activity within each metro and tracks the performance of each area's business sector. 

The full table of results for all 366 metros is here, on the BEA site. The map, above, has a color code, with the darkest blue (the highest growth areas) in dark blue. The light blue group, in which Spokane sits, is the next best growth category.

Among the metros that lost GDP were Seattle-Tacoma, which fell by roughly one-tenth of a percent. Its GDP score was 228,797, or roughly 13 times that of Spokane.

Boise and Portland also slipped in GDP, according to the BEA numbers.

A Spokesman Review business story on Thursday will summarize the key points and add commentary.

Greater Spokane Incorporated will focus on the area’s manufacturing sector in a Tuesday morning town hall session at the Red Lion Hotel in downtown Spokane.

Bob Weidner, president and CEO of Metals Service Center Institution, will be the keynote speaker on how public policy in manufacturing impacts companies, individuals and communities.

The public meeting and discussion will run from 7:30 to 10:30 a.m.

To register, go here. Tickets are $25 for GSI members, $30 otherwise.

The gathering will review what’s happened to the area’s manufacturing sector and survey initiatives to create more jobs in that sector.