To get North Carolina’s ailing economy back on track, policymakers must first come to grips with this little-recognized truth: our problems didn’t start in 2007.

It actually started during the 1990s.

There are many different ways to measure economic performance. But the statistic most researchers prefer is real gross domestic product per capita. That is, they take the annual estimate of all goods and services produced for market in each state and adjust for changes in inflation and population.

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