Read the report here.

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New York State’s continuing loss of residents to other states — the nation’s biggest “domestic migration” outflow since the start of the decade — is the focus of a new research report from the Empire Center for Public Policy.

Entitled “Empire State Exodus,” the report uses the latest data from the Census Bureau and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) as the basis for examining how many New Yorkers have been leaving the state, where they have been going and how much income they have been taking with them. It includes detailed breakdowns of population migration patterns at a regional and county level.

“The Empire State is being drained of an invaluable resource—people,” the report begins. “From 2000 to 2008, in both absolute and relative terms, New York experienced the nation’s largest loss of residents to other states—a net domestic migration outflow of over 1.5 million, or 8 percent of its population at the start of the decade.”

Focusing on the period since 2000, key findings include the following:

The annual net loss of New Yorkers to other states has ranged from a high of nearly 250,000 people in 2005 to a low of 126,000 last year, when moves nationwide slowed down sharply along with the economy.

Most of the New York State out-migrants tracked by the IRS originated in the metropolitan New York City region.

Nearly 60 percent of the New York out-migrants moved to southern states—with Florida alone drawing nearly one-third of the total. Thirty percent moved to the neighboring states of New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Connecticut.

Households moving out of New York State had average incomes 13 per-cent higher than those moving into New York during the most recent year for which such data are available. In 2006-07 alone, the migration flow out of New York drained $4.3 billion in taxpayer income from the state.

New York taxpayers moving to other states had average incomes of $57,144, while those moving into New York had average incomes of $50,533 as of 2007.

“Even with its large domestic migration losses, New York’s total population has grown slightly since 2000, thanks to a large influx of immigrants from foreign countries,” the report says. “But New York’s share of U.S. population is still shrinking. A continuation of the domestic migration trends highlighted here will translate into slower economic growth and diminishing political influence in the future.”

The report’s lead author was Wendell Cox, a nationally prominent consultant who has done extensive writing and research on economics, poverty alleviation, demographics, urban policy and transport. The co-author was E.J. McMahon, senior fellow with the Manhattan Institute and director of the Empire Center, which is a project of the Institute.