Growth in the Gross Domestic Product – 3.5 percent – during the third quarter offered modest encouragement about the nationwide economy, but we agree with three of Northeast Mississippi’s veteran private-sector leaders who expressed deep reservations about claims of recovery, especially in our region.

President Obama himself said the Commerce Department’s GDP numbers, stronger than forecast, indicate the nation has a long way to go before a strong claim can be made that the recession has been overcome.

We agree with assessments that suggest the deepest part of the recession may be past, but as Community Development Foundation President David Rumbarger said last week, “We don’t know how steep the climb is on this side of the valley.”

Rumbarger specifically cited persisting high unemployment across the region, some counties higher and some slightly lower than the statewide 9.2 percent, which is a small decline from most of the previous months in 2009.

Rickey Settlemires, a longtime executive at The Peoples Bank in Ripley, said the recession’s grip in Tippah County, which borders on Tennessee in the Mississippi Highway 15 corridor, is most evident in unemployment, which is 12.5 percent. Settlemires said the disappearance of furniture industry jobs as an economic mainstay has dealt the county a strong hit, with retail sales struggling and sales tax revenues reflecting the struggle.

Settlemires said he hopes Tippah County will see at least the beginnings of recovery by late 2010.

Tupelo Mayor Jack Reed is cautiously, marginally more optimistic, noting that the city’s sales tax revenue decline may have bottomed out, with August numbers reflecting a surge brought with the Cash for Clunkers car purchase rebate program. Still, the collections declined by 1 percent, but that is seen as encouraging news.

Reed also said some business owners he has talked to say their sales are improving, suggesting strengthening consumer demand.

Reed, however, agreed with Settlemires and Rumbarger that the jobless rate remains too high to claim recovery.

Rumbarger said the three historic indicators of a strong economy – consumer spending, car purchases, and home sales –  all remain less than robust.

So, where is the baseline for optimism within the region?

All three of the leaders interviewed are part of private-sector organizations working hard to overcome the jobless rate with new jobs development, including bold initiatives in education and readiness for the new economy’s better and different jobs.

The federal government can stimulate, but it cannot sustain economic strength.

All the programs of the Great Depression did not remake the impoverished South, it sustained it until a new vision from private-sector development took hold after World War II.

That great wave of development and its immediate successors have in many measures disappeared, but the revisioning from private leaders, partnering appropriately with government, can develop another sustained era of growth and increasing prosperity.

Partisanship has little to do with developing prosperity. Partisanship, politically and geographically, is narrow and self-defeating.

Collaboration is the key – working in alliances of common interests to bring the new economy to Northeast Mississippi, a strategy similar to the methods used by those who successfully led the post-war economic transformation.