We’ve commented on the national economy as well as jobs across our country on several occasions over the past couple months. Today, however, we want to comment on the state of employment in, well, our own state: New Jersey. Just how far has the Garden State come in terms of recovering the number of jobs lost since the pre-recession peak in 2008? Very far, according to the Rutgers Economic Advisory Service (R/ECON). To illustrate how close, Nancy Mantell, the director of R/ECON, recently noted that NJ will match the previous high sometime in early 2017.
It has been a tough recovery by this metric for NJ, as on a national scale, the takeover already occurred in March of this year. Nonetheless, R/ECON predicts that post-2018, employment growth in NJ will mirror the nation’s.
In addition to steady job growth, our state’s residents are expected to continue benefiting from continued personal income growth and low inflation. As for personal income growth, expectations are for another 4-plus percent this year; inflation, meanwhile, is expected to hold under 1 percent for 2016 thanks in large part to falling energy prices.
All-in-all, even as it may appear that our state’s economic recovery is also sluggish or uneven, the fact of the matter is that employment is growing, wages are increasing, and inflation remains subdued. Things aren’t so bad here in the Garden State.
