America’s economy may be picking up steam, but it remains a story of parts, with the various regions of the country performing in often radically divergent ways.

To identify the regions with the most momentum coming out of the recession, we turned to Mark Schill, research director for the Praxis Strategy Group, who crunched a range of indicative data from 2007 to today for the nation’s 52 largest metropolitan statistical areas. To gauge economic vitality, we used four metrics: GDP growth, job growth, real median household income growth and current unemployment. To measure demographic strength we looked at population growth, birth rate, domestic migration and the change in educational attainment. All factors were weighted equally.

Image: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:View_from_Tower_of_the_Americas.jpg