By David J. Lynch @ WashingtonPost.com, April 5

[....] “It is striking,” said Mark Muro, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. “Rural towns are doing better in the West. Smaller towns are doing better in the West.”[....]

The West has navigated these shifting economic tides better than other parts of the country. Since 2010, it has been by far the fastest-growing region in the country, according to the Census Bureau, expanding output two-thirds faster than the Midwest and more than twice as fast as the Northeast.

Based on measures of new-business formation, migration and job churn, Western states are significantly more dynamic than those in the East, said John Lettieri, president and CEO of the Economic Innovation Group, a Washington think tank [....]

“These are newer economies. They have fewer concrete cinder blocks to drag around behind them as they’re trying to grow,” he said. “There’s an unmistakable East-West divide.”

In much of the country, small towns were poorly equipped to capitalize on the new economy of globalized supply chains and high-technology services jobs. But Western towns such as Hamilton were never heavily dependent upon manufacturing. Lacking big factories that could be hollowed out by competition from China or automation, they escaped the big job losses that went with them [....]