JACKSON, Miss. (WJTV) – The common adage we heard from Gov. Tate Reeves’ (R-Miss.) throughout last year’s gubernatorial race was, “Mississippi has momentum.”

At the start of his second term, Reeves has doubled down on his promises of economic growth, and he has dipped into the state’s coffers to bring record-breaking developments to the state.

With only 53% of the state’s population working, Mississippi still ranks as the poorest state in the country. With a declining population, is there momentum, and will Mississippians stick around long enough to benefit from it?

This past Legislative Session, Reeves called two special sessions to allocate state funds into the biggest economic development projects in state history: an electric battery plant located on the Mississippi-Tennessee border and an Amazon data center in Madison County.

Dr. Joshua Hendrickson, chair of the Department of Economics at the University of Mississippi, said the goal of these massive investments is to reap the benefits of what he calls network effects.

“The feeling is, is that if you can get enough people doing manufacturing in a particular area, yeah, you might have to give like tax incentives and things like that to get them there. But once you get maybe a critical mass of this kind of production going on, then what happens is you get more companies who decide to show up there without, you know, as generous a tax benefit or even eventually without tax benefits at all just because they want to be close to those other areas. From there, you know, you start to get bigger populations in the area. You get bigger populations in the area. There’s like more retail, going from economic development to economic growth is really contingent upon whether you can create those network effects,” Hendrickson stated.

The “build it and they will come” approach is a long game that hinges on the success of the investments and also the workforce.

“You have to do some of this development stuff, you have to do it, because every state is doing it. And so, if you’re not going to play the game, you’re just going to lose. You have to create an environment that attracts people here independent of the particular benefits that are going to particular projects,” said Hendrickson. “The main issue that Mississippi has with maintaining young people is that young people tend to cluster towards, you know, large metropolitan areas, and we just don’t have large metropolitan areas. But if you get to like the these like micropolitan places, that’s like 10,000 to 50,000, Mississippi has a ton of those places. If you can generate those network effects, they’re going to turn some of these micropolitan areas into metropolitan areas.”

Those network effects could remedy Mississippi’s declining population, as well as alleviate our labor force participation rate of just 53.7%. That’s the lowest in the country and nine points below the national average.

“But I think the biggest challenge in Mississippi is young people, high school age people in Mississippi tend to have much lower labor force participation than, you know, surrounding states. And also, they tend to have higher unemployment. So, it’s not just an issue of them not being in the labor force. Even those that are in the labor force are finding it harder to get jobs,” said Hendrickson. “Solving this problem is very hard. I think that the thing about politicians is I think they think they tend to think of everything is sort of like top down, like we do something and then something happens. A lot of times what’s going on is like you just have to kind of create the environment that rewards people for the particular types of behavior that you want them to participate in, and then it just kind of naturally flows up more from the bottom up than from the top down. This is not something that’s easy to sort of micromanage from the top down.”