This upturn depends on where you are

Call this the spotty economic recovery.

Key indicators like productivity and factory orders are on the rise nationally. Even unemployment dipped slightly last month.

But those numbers haven't yet translated into an economic rebound in many states and metro areas, from Vermont to California, from New York City to Atlanta.

The reason: the battered financial services, telecommunications, and high-tech sectors in those areas are still in a slump.

Companies like IBM, Hewlett-Packard, and WorldCom are still cutting back. With each move, they can send economic shock waves throughout the local communities where their plants are located.

Just ask Bill Russell, who after 21 years as a senior technician at IBM in Essex Junction, Vt., was handed a pink slip last week, as were nearly a thousand of his colleagues. "I don't care what the numbers say," he says. "When you're laid off, you're laid off."

The impact of those job losses is rippling throughout the state. At the Everyday Bookshop in Burlington, Elizabeth Orr is worried about a drop in hardcover sales. Similar stories are being told in parts of California, Texas, and Illinois.

And nationally, the mixed economic news is translating into uncertainty, according to a new Christian Science Monitor/TIPP poll. The poll's "index of economic optimism" stands at 59.7, down from 60.6 in May and a high for the year of 62.9 in March.

While any number above 50 reflects a positive outlook, the recent dip suggests consumer caution amid a fragile recovery from recession.

"There's real fear that a double-dip recession is possible, or a period where the economy just languishes and has no real spark to turn around," says John Challenger, the CEO of Challenger, Gray & Christmas, an international outplacement firm based in Chicago. "The consumer has carried this economy on his or her back during the last year and a half."

While the Midwest is usually the place where a rebound lags, this time it's many of the nation's recent economic powerhouses – including not just Chicago but Silicon Valley, New York, and Atlanta – that are struggling.

Even the Sun Belt – that optimistic Southern swath that in recent years has been a magnet for manufacturing jobs from the North and the Midwest – is in the doldrums. In the Monitor/TIPP poll, it registered the greatest drop in confidence.

"It's generally the most robust region," says Raghavan Mayur, president of TIPP, which conducts the poll and is a unit of TechnoMetrica Market Intelligence in Oredell, N.J. "But for some reason they're shedding some of their confidence."

Take Georgia, for instance. The state has lost 125,000 jobs since last April, 80,000 in the Atlanta metro region. That represents about 3.1 percent of its workforce, says Rajeev Dhawan, director of Economic Forecasting Center at Georgia State University in Atlanta. It's also about the same number jobs the area grew accustomed to generating each year during the booming '90s.

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