New Hampshire's Full Job Recovery in 2014

The New England Economic Partnership (NEEP) recently released new economic forecasts for the U.S., the New England Region and each of the six New England states at its 2012 Spring Economic Outlook Conference.

Dennis Delay, New Hampshire Forecast Manager for NEEP, noted that New Hampshire's job recovery continues, but at a near glacial pace.

At the current rate of growth, New Hampshire will have regained all of the jobs lost in the Great Recession by mid-2014. New England will be back to the pre-recession level of 7.1 million jobs by early 2015, said Delay who is also an economist at the NH Center for Public Policy Studies. New Hampshire continues its slow, steady emergence from the Great Recession, having fared better than most of the rest of the country.

Delay said, The state's unemployment rate stood at 5 percent in April 2012, well below the 8.1 national rate.

But job growth in the recovery remains slow, Delay noted. New Hampshire had 650,000 nonfarm jobs in 2008, as the recession began taking hold, and the state will not see that many jobs again until the second quarter of 2014.

Highlights of the NH May 2012 Forecast

New Hampshire manufacturing jobs will increase only slightly from 2011 to 2016, at a 0.4% average increase each year.
Private service producing jobs will increase 1.6% annually in the forecast period, with the fastest rate of growth in professional and business services, followed by the leisure and hospitality industry.
New Hampshire construction jobs will increase 2.3% annually in the forecast period, as housing permits increase from the current annual rate of 2,200 per year to a more typical 5,000 per year.  This forecast assumes that NH will once again see positive domestic in-migration, but at ower rates than in the beginning of the last decade.

In prior recoveries, New Hampshire's rate of job growth often substantially outstripped employment expansion in New England and the nation. In July of 1985, for example, the New Hampshire employment base was 60 percent higher than in July 1975, while New England grew 30 percent and the U.S. grew about 27 percent in the same 10 year period. But more recent employment growth data shows less difference in job growth, with slower rates for all three regions and New Hampshire's growth rate closer to the regional and national averages. The most recent data shows little difference in job growth between New Hampshire, New England and the United States as of April 2012.

Addressing the conference theme of Skills and People Matching, Delay noted that the skills gap can be defined as the mismatch between the quality of the labor force and the skill sets required by employers. But it is not clear whether unemployment is still high because workers lack the necessary skills, or because many employers are reluctant to hire in a still weakened economy because of low demand, he said.