"Iowa lost over 50,000 jobs from the start of the recession until the middle of this year," said Noga O'Connor, research associate for the nonpartisan Iowa Policy Project (IPP) and author of The State of Working Iowa 2010. "In addition, the Iowa unemployment rate has spiked from under 4 percent to almost 7 percent.

"When you look carefully at the numbers, you can see most of those losses were done by the middle of last year, so the effects of the recession appear to have bottomed out. Still, we have a long way to go in catching up with where job numbers stood as recently as December 2007."

IPP Executive Director David Osterberg said it was important to note that while Iowa looks better now in comparison to other states on its unemployment rate, which stood at 6.8 percent in July, other states had been expanding faster before the latest downturn.

"Even before the recession, Iowa's job picture was not pretty, showing slow improvements from the previous recession while other parts of the country did better. So Iowa didn't have as far to fall when declines came with the 2007 recession," Osterberg said.