Behind South Carolina's economic expansion are healthy job gains in some areas that have provided opportunities, paychecks and financial security.

But on a recent afternoon in Greenville, the faces of Sivia Juliana Perez, Jose V. Espinosa and Johnny Ritchie reflected the concern of residents who say they have seen little improvement in the local economy.

They say it's hard to find a good-paying job, or just employment in some cases. And they don't necessarily understand the rosy declarations that the Upstate is prospering as it attempts to move from a dependence on labor-intensive manufacturing to a powerful service economy supporting research and innovation.

Among the state's five metropolitan areas that experienced job growth last year, Greenville ranked fourth and lagged such areas as Columbia and Charleston.

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The Greenville area grew by 1,800 jobs, well behind Columbia (4,600), Charleston (4,500) and Myrtle Beach (4,100), according to a report by the South Carolina Employment Security Commission.

What's more, Greenville annually averaged just 0.5 percent growth in its labor force between 2001 and 2004, according to data from the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond.

That ranked Greenville ahead of only the Sumter metro area, where job totals declined annually an average of 1.2 percent.

"There's nothing good out there." said Ritchie, 44, as he sat in the state's local unemployment office on Pendleton Street.

"It's very hard," said Perez, 20, originally from Los Angeles but living in Greenville now and looking for a medical assistant's job.

Employers are hiring and there are strong local job-training efforts to upgrade workers' skills to meet job demand, especially in some technical areas, said Bill Pendleton, area director of the employment security office in Greenville.

"But what I can't measure is how many people are discouraged," he said. "I still talk to a lot of frustrated people. Solid credentials. Great work history. And they can't find a job comparable to what they were laid off from."

Greenville and much of the Upstate still are weighed down by historical ties to manufacturing, particularly the battered textile and apparel industries, experts say.

They insist there is no quick fix -- such as Clemson University's International Center for Automotive Research in Greenville.

While those projects certainly help, the experts say the solution is a complicated process of a broader reach into the new global economy, vital educational improvements and even better nutrition and prenatal care.

They say the region also needs higher-paying jobs to lift its inflation-adjusted per capita income, which is dropping.

"We have seen a transformation of that old manufacturing economy into a new economy, but we still have the transformation process taking place," said Bruce Yandle, interim dean of the College of Business and Behavioral Science at Clemson.

Areas such as Columbia are moving ahead without having to make such an economic transition, he said.

"The Columbia economy today looks very much like the Greenville economy," Yandle said. "That was not the case 10 years ago, certainly not the case 20 years ago. So what you're getting in the Columbia region is a true transformation. They're getting a substantial manufacturing sector, and it's primarily a high-tech sector."

The Central SC Alliance said that last year it helped generate $591 million in capital investment across its 12-county region, which includes Lexington and Richland counties in metro Columbia.

At the group's recent annual meeting, Alliance chairman George Bullwinkel told investors and other economic partners that 2,700 new jobs had been created in central South Carolina in 2005.

In the Upstate, economic recruiters said there has been more than $3 billion in new capital investment in the last seven years, the metropolitan area has led the nation in European expansions and the region is home to such companies as BMW, Michelin, General Electric, Bowater and Lockheed Martin.

Ray Lattimore, chairman of the Greenville Area Development Corp., the county's economic development arm, said 3,211 jobs and $821.9 million in capital investment were announced in the 10-county area last year, and the region is doing even better this year.

"This economy is on the move and we're creating jobs in Greenville," he said. "The jobs that we're creating today, the average per capita income is about $20 per hour, so we're bringing in higher-paying jobs."

Labor officials also said last week Greenville County's unemployment rate was 5 percent in April, down slightly from a month earlier and well below the state rate of 6.6 percent. The national jobless rate was 4.7 percent.

Yandle said the Greenville metro region may be entering a turnaround, but he sees troubling signs in the area's percentage of adults who are college graduates. The local rate is about 20 to 22 percent, compared with nearly 40 percent in the Research Triangle Park area of North Carolina and more than 40 percent in Charlottesville, Va., he said.

"We're in much better shape in Greenville County and in the metropolitan area than we are, obviously, for the state as a whole," Yandle said. "But we still have a high dropout rate from high school.

"If you want to say, 'well, we want to fix that,' there's not a quick fix," he said. "But the end result has to be more knowledgeable people in order to be able to participate in a knowledge economy. And we're weak."

Moving forward, many businesses say they are "cautiously optimistic" about how the region will fare in its shift away from manufacturing to an economy relying more on service-sector, back-office, health-care and technology jobs.

"We're dealing with a shrinking industrial base, so you have to do better with the opportunities that are in front of you," said John Baker, capital project development manager with O'Neal Inc., a Greenville-based planning, design and construction firm serving the pharmaceutical, biotechnology, chemical, automotive, pulp and paper, specialty fibers and plastics industries.

Existing industries historically generate 80 percent of capital investment, and they won't create jobs as fast as they once did, Baker said.