LAS VEGAS — When the last recession battered the nation, the bottom fell out in Las Vegas. One out of every six jobs vanished. Home prices dropped as much as 50 percent. Construction projects stopped in place, and tourist spending on the Las Vegas Strip, the economic driver of this city, went into an alarming slide.

These days, however, jobs are back, the housing market is bustling and people are moving back. The number of visitors hit a record high last year.

But the recovery in Las Vegas — much like the one lifting the nation — is shaping up as fragile and tentative, stirring concern among economists and many of the region’s biggest boosters.

And it is signaling what appears to be a fundamental reordering of the economy in this closely watched part of the country.

More than 39.7 million visitors came here in 2012, a record. But those visitors spent notably less money per trip than during the last upturn — $1,021 per visit last year, compared with $1,318 per trip spent by the 39.2 million visitors in 2007, according to the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority — a sobering asterisk that has led many analysts to conclude that this high-rolling city is entering a less prosperous era.

The total revenue from gambling and entertainment other than gambling was $15.3 billion in 2012, $500 million less than was spent in 2007.

“The Strip is absolutely packed; downtown is packed,” said David Schwartz, the director of the Center for Gaming Research at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. “People are here. But they aren’t spending as much as they used to.”

A shift in the structure of the economy that began about a decade ago appears to have accelerated. Gambling is no longer king. A new influx of tourists, younger and less devoted to gambling, are likelier to open their wallets for extravagantly priced nightclubs and day clubs, which have joined concerts and musical shows, high-end restaurants, luxury shopping and some of the more exotic types of entertainment this city is renowned for offering.

From the Mandarin Oriental Hotel’s 23rd-floor bar the other evening, with its desert views and $18 specialty cocktails, the new building-size digital billboards that loom over the Strip flashed out advertisements not for the slots, but for Tiesto, the DJ playing at Hakkasan, a 75,000-square-foot nightclub where reserving a table for the night can cost $10,000 and more.

“Gaming went down more than total visitor spending, by a greater percentage,” said Stephen Brown, the director of the Center for Business and Economic Research at UNLV. “The visitors who have come back are here for clubs and shopping. They’re buying swimsuits to go to the day clubs and evening clothes to go to the nightclubs. That’s the big growth.”

“I think what’s going on here is we’re seeing a shift away from Las Vegas as the only gaming destination in the United States to being one of many gaming destinations,” Brown said. “But it is holding up as a tourist destination.”

In 1984, the city’s sprawling casinos accounted for 59 percent of all the money collected on the Strip. Last year, gambling made up just 36 percent of the revenue. Clark County, which includes Las Vegas, took in $9.4 billion in gambling revenue last year, up from the year before but still far short of the $10.8 billion during the peak year of 2007, according to statistics from the Center for Gaming Research.

Las Vegas has a long history of reinvigorating itself, of finding new ways to bring in new consumers and to entice them to part with large sums of money. Still, the latest lift provided by the exploding nightclub business is troubling to local officials who view it as little more than a flash in the pan and worry that the city is reaping the temporary benefits of, as one worried Las Vegas executive put it, a “club bubble.”

“I don’t know where these young people get the money for that — it’s just amazing to me,” said Chris Giunchigliani, a member of the Las Vegas County Commission. “Clubbing is always going to be around, but at some point, it’s like how we overbuilt hotel rooms. They’re going to look at the market and start to scale back.”