How has the war in Iraq affected the South Carolina economy?
To be honest, it is very difficult to say with any degree of certainty how the war in Iraq has affected the national of state economies. This is almost always the case, whether looking to isolate the impact of events like wars, natural disasters, government policy changes, or technological innovations. This is because any economy is always being affected by three major types of influences: cyclical forces, structural forces, and shocks. For example, during 2003 and 2004, the states economy has been affected by: the business cycle via the transition from jobless recovery to positive job growth, by structural forces via the ongoing and long-term shift from manufacturing towards services, and by shocks such as the start of the war during March 2003. Because all of these forces are occurring simultaneously, it is a tough job to try to disentangle the separate influences of these forces. Now, it is largely this kind of disentangling that economists try to do all of the time, often with very
