Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moody's Analytics, expects 2014 to be a "breakout year." He predicts that within three years the US economy will reach full employment — estimated as a 5.75 percent jobless rate and 64 percent labor force participation.
States Rebound After Housing Hit
The housing bust decimated the economies of Arizona, California, Florida and Nevada. Now all four states are seeing steady growth—but for different reasons.
Arizona is getting a boost from the high-tech industry. Apple announced it will open a new plant in Mesa and hire 2,000 workers to build and operate the facility. Intel is completing work on a $5 billion semiconductor plant expansion in Chandler, which will add 1,000 jobs. And the Internet domain company, GoDaddy, has broken ground on a new 150,000-square-foot technology center in Tempe that initially will employ 300 people.
“While growth is slow compared to past recoveries, we are making good progress compared to other states,” said research professor Lee McPheters at Arizona State University’s W. P. Carey School of Business.
McPheters said Arizona jumped from being the 49th ranked state for job growth in 2010 to the seventh ranked state in October 2013, based on his analysis of data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Moody’s puts Arizona at No. 2 for 2014. Despite that high ranking, McPheters said Arizona is still two to three years from a full economic recovery. He figures the state has regained 46 percent of the jobs it lost in the recession, but it still has 170,000 more jobs to go.
Only 15 states and the District of Columbia have recovered all the jobs they lost during the recession, according to the latest report from the Joint Economic Committee, which was created by Congress to review economic policy. The 15 are Colorado, Iowa, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Maryland, Minnesota, Montana, Nebraska, New York, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Texas, Utah, Vermont and West Virginia.
Construction Boom in Florida
In Florida, a surge in construction and increased tourism are behind the state’s strong job outlook for 2014. Florida is expected to add more than 176,000 jobs next year, which will go a long way toward helping Republican Gov. Rick Scott live up to his 2010 election-year promise to create 700,000 jobs in seven years.
Sean Snaith, director of the University of Central Florida’s Institute for Economic Competitiveness, predicts Florida will have added 600,000 jobs through 2014, when Scott is running for re-election. Snaith figures the state will hit the 700,000 mark by the middle of 2015.
Some of the jobs stem from companies relocating their headquarters to Florida, including Hertz, where some 700 employees are expected to be relocated by 2015 from New Jersey and Tulsa, Okla. The recently merged companies, Office Depot and OfficeMax, also will set up a new global headquarters in Boca Raton, a move that Scott has called “a game-changer” for Florida.
Silicon Valley Boosts California
California, the world’s ninth-largest economy, missed making Moody’s list of the top 10 states for job growth, but at 15th it is expected to do relatively well. A recovering housing market and the high-tech industry in Silicon Valley are largely responsible for California’s bright outlook.
California added jobs at a rate faster than the national average in 2013, including posting more new construction jobs than any other state in 2013, with more than 31,500 new jobs.
The new jobs are largely along the coast, particularly Silicon Valley, which created payroll employment at twice the U.S. rate in 2013, according to the latest forecast from the UCLA Anderson Forecast.
Jobs are more plentiful in the Bay Area, Orange County, San Diego and Ventura compared to the rest of the country, while the Sacramento Delta, the San Joaquin Valley and the Inland Empire are doing less well.
Among the few bright spots inland in California are Kern County’s booming renewable energy sector; the new medical school at the University of California, Riverside that opened in 2013; and Amazon plans to open a 1.2 million-square-foot logistics center in Moreno Valley.
Nevada Recovering with Las Vegas
Nevada’s job outlook has improved considerably from its worst unemployment of 14 percent, but it still has a long way to go to replace all of its recession-related losses. Moody’s expects the state to create 20,000 jobs in 2014, about the same as last year.
The state still depends largely on gambling and tourism in Las Vegas, which has already exceeded numbers of visitors seen before the recession. The state expects these sectors will help create nearly 8,000 new jobs in retail and hospitality in 2014.
The recession wiped out 200,000 jobs in Nevada, half of them in construction. The state is slowly gaining some back. Several new projects are sparking a comeback in that sector:
- Caesars Entertainment’s $550 million, 300,000-square feet “LINQ,” an entertainment district anchored by the world’s tallest observation wheel. The project has employed about 3,000 construction workers and will create approximately 1,500 permanent jobs.
- Malaysia-based Genting Group is expected to begin construction sometime in 2014 on its $2 billion 87-acre Resorts World Las Vegas that the company promises will bring “tens of thousands of jobs to Southern Nevada for many years to come.”
Nevertheless, Nevada expects employment to remain below the peak levels of 2007 for several more years, according to Bill Anderson, the state’s chief economist.
Stateline is a nonpartisan, nonprofit news service of the Pew Charitable Trusts that provides daily reporting and analysis on trends in state policy.
More Articles
- Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System: Something’s Got to Give by Governor Christopher J. Waller
- Department of Labor Awards $5M to Train, Expand Pathways for Women for Registered Apprenticeships, Nontraditional Occupations
- Selective Exposure and Partisan Echo Chambers in Television News Consumption: Innovative Use of Data Yields Unprecedented Insights
- February’s Hot Data Releases: Governor Christopher J. Waller, Federal Reserve Board Frames a Few of the Issues Around Inflation and the Economic Outlook
- Jo Freeman Reviews Thank You For Your Servitude: Donald Trump's Washington and the Price of Submission
- Remarks by President Biden on American Rescue Plan Investments; September 02, 2022, South Court Auditorium Eisenhower Executive Office Building
- The US Housing and Mortgage Market, Risks and Resilience: Federal Reserve Governor Michelle W. Bowman
- Voting Rights: Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke Testifies Before the Senate Judiciary Committee Hearing; “One of the most monumental laws in the entire history of American freedom”
- Journalist's Resource: Religious Exemptions and Required Vaccines; Examining the Research
- Federal Reserve Issues A Federal Open Market Committee Statement: Committee Will Aim to Achieve Inflation Moderately Above 2% For Some Time