PENSACOLA (AP) – Despite the economy, James Sellers’ industrial parts plant in the rural Florida Panhandle is doing well. He has 16 full-time employees, orders are up and the future looks reasonably good.

Sellers’ AUS Manufacturing in tiny Bonifay is a success story not often heard in a state that is a center for the recession that started with the real estate crisis. But it turns out that many areas in the slow-paced northern parts of Florida, polar opposites of boom-and-bust cities like Miami, are escaping the worst.

An Associated Press analysis shows that rural Panhandle counties with stable populations, dependable government jobs and no coast to overbuild condos on are doing better than places in the rest of the state.

The AP Economic Stress Index combines three indicators – unemployment, foreclosures and bankruptcies – to gauge how the recession has affected more than 3,000 counties in the United States. The higher the index’s number for a county, the worse the recession’s impact.

The average stress score for the six counties in the rural, northern Panhandle – Calhoun, Gadsden, Holmes, Jackson, Liberty and Washington – was 8.6 in April, compared to a statewide average of 11.56 and a national average of 9.7. Liberty County came in at 5.35 – the lowest in the state.

Despite the lower stress scores now, the region’s economy has lagged other parts of the state for decades. These counties have among the lowest per capita income in Florida. The per capita income in Liberty County is $22,831 compared to state per capita income of $39,070 in 2008, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis.

Rick Harper, director of the University of West Florida’s Haas Center for Business Research, said the rural Panhandle counties scored so much lower than the rest of Florida largely because of the real estate market.

“Those counties did not participate in the housing boom. There wasn’t someone buying a home in Holmes or Liberty county for $200,000 in 2002 and selling it for $300,000 in 2006. There is not a second-home market up there and you didn’t see a lot of real estate speculation,” he said.

As Florida’s population and real estate market soared earlier this decade, the economy of the rural northern Panhandle counties remained mostly flat.

Sellers and his partners opened their company in a manufacturing plant vacated when a textile factory where his mother had worked for 30 years closed in the early 1990s and laid off several hundred workers.

“The job picture here has been going down since the 1980s because of the machining competition overseas in the textile industry,” he said.

“People are still in trouble, they are cutting their spending and worried about their businesses,” he added.

Lifelong Liberty County resident and county economic development director Johnny Eubanks, 76, said the county’s low stress scores also has do with the region’s conservative values of spending less and remaining close to home.

“Our economy has been more of a level playing field all the way through the last few decades. We have a rural lifestyle here and people here tend to associate more with Georgia and Alabama,” he said.

Many residents in the county of 7,957 work in the nearby state prison and others commute to state jobs in Tallahassee. A Georgia Pacific wood processing plant is also a large employer.

Prisons are a dependable employer in Jackson County where the stress index is 7.68 and the population is 49,656, said Bill Stanton, the county’s longtime economic development director.

“We are second only to Leon County (Tallahassee) for state jobs. We have eight state correctional institutions and two federal correctional institutions. Even in a downturn, the prisons stay in business,” he said. “We are feeling the recession but we are blessed in not feeling it as much they are in coastal Florida and in the larger cities.”