As Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s entrance into the presidential race seems more likely, economists and journalists argue how much credit he deserves for Texas’ job growth. Perry portrays Texas as “America’s new land of opportunity,” and in some ways this seems true.

During the past decade, Texas added a million new jobs, more than almost every other state combined. Over the past year, Texas had the largest increase in employment, with 220,000 new jobs, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Since the end of the recession in June 2009, Texas has accounted for almost 45 percent of the nation’s job growth, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas.

Does Perry deserve credit for this growth, or is it due to other factors?

Critics say many of the new jobs are poorly paid: Texas and Mississippi share the nation’s highest proportion of minimum-wage workers. About 9.5 percent of hourly workers in these states are paid at or below minimum wage. But considering that Texas is one of the fastest growing states, with comparatively cheap housing and a low cost of living, the growth of low-wage jobs is not necessarily bad.

“Low-wage jobs are part of the global economy,” said Texas A&M economist Mark Dotzour: “The only people who cast aspersions on low-wage jobs are people who don’t understand how the global economy works.”

Critics say Texas benefits from its oil and gas industry,, which provides both high-paying jobs and trickle-down benefits for other businesses. They focus on Texas’s 8.2 percent unemployment rate, much lower than the national one but still higher than that of two dozen other states. Perry and his supporters, on the other hand, emphasize the number of new jobs, which they attribute to the low-tax, low-regulation policies that Perry has maintained in his decade as governor.

One of Texas’s attractions for employers and job-seekers is that it is one of only seven states with no personal income tax. The Texas Public Policy Foundation says Texas’s overall tax burden is 8.4 percent, compared to 9.7 percent nationally. One example of Texas’s business-friendly environment is its limitations on medical lawsuits: In 2003 Perry signed into law tort reform legislation, and in the following three years physician applications increased by 57 percent.

Also in 2003, Perry created The Texas Enterprise Fund, one of the nation’s most aggressive business recruitment funds. Since its creation, the fund has given businesses more than $435 million in grants and financial incentives. According to Perry’s office, these grants and incentives resulted in 58,000 jobs.

Perry is not surprised by the state’s success. “This isn’t rocket science,” Perry said this month at an announcement that video game maker Electronics Arts was bringing more than 300 new jobs to Austin. “You keep taxes relatively low, you have a regulatory climate that’s fair and predictable, a legal system that doesn’t allow for over suing and you have institutions of higher learning … who allow for these innovative programs to be developed because of the curriculum that they put in the schools.”

Natalie Garnett is a student at Baylor University and a summer intern for WORLD Magazine
@2011 WORLD Magazine – used with permission