Honolulu's ranking in a study of best U.S. cities for creating and sustaining jobs has taken a hit because of the state's slowing economy.

Honolulu tumbled 54 places to 94th in the ranking and was identified as one of the cities having the biggest drop compared to the prior year. The findings are included in the study of 324 municipalities in the Best-Performing Cities 2008 report by the Milken Institute and Greenstreet Real Estate Partners.

The report attempts to identify cities where businesses are thriving or struggling and where workers are seeing increases or declines in wages. Besides looking at job growth over both five- and one-year periods, researchers also considered growth in high-technology industries and how wages rose or fell. Honolulu fell into the large-city category of 100.

Milken Institute Research Economist Armen Bedroussian said much of Honolulu's fall in the index can be traced to a decline in tourism.

He also mentioned real estate jobs shrank by 2,000 between 2006 and 2007 as property transactions fell.

"A lot of it ties back to tourism," said Bedroussian, who works at Milken's Santa Monica, Calif., offices. "You had pretty significant hikes in airfares."

He said that has resulted in people looking for less-expensive vacations elsewhere.

The report noted that as growth rates diverge people move from areas with weaker increases to locations experiencing more rapid gains.

"Cities with large concentrations of technology firms have been performing quite well, as have metros that are highly dependent on export-intensive industries," the report said.

"Rising energy prices have hindered the performance of cities where industries with high energy use are the key drivers, while benefiting those regions with significant oil and gas production and exploration activities."

The report also noted that growth as a whole declined during 2007, with inflation-adjusted gross domestic product rising 2.1 percent. That compared with 2.9 percent in 2006.

While Honolulu's decline in the ranking was noteworthy — it had the 14th-worst drop in the ranking — Bedroussian said it still had faster growth than national averages over the past five years when it came to wages and jobs.

Nor does the study consider quality-of-life measures cited by many people as one of the reasons they live in Hawai'i. The report authors said those types of measures, while important, can be highly subjective and thus are less meaningful than the ones they used.

The Provo-Orem, Utah, area ranked as the top metropolitan area of the large cities studied. The Detroit-Livonia-Dearborn area of Michigan ranked as the lowest.

The authors also reviewed the economic progress of 124 smaller cities in a separate ranking. No Hawai'i cities were on that list.