Index: Confident Mass. employers expecting strong recovery
Photo | Edd Cote
Downtown Worcester
After a surge in March, confidence among businesses in Massachusetts took a tiny step backward in April but analysts said firms have their eyes on a robust recovery over the next six months.
The Associated Industries of Massachusetts' monthly confidence index had been climbing strongly since December but shed 0.2 points in April. At 60.7 on a scale of 0 to 100, the index sits "comfortably in optimistic territory" and is 22.5 points higher than its reading a year ago, AIM said.
The sub-index that measures overall business conditions at the time of the survey slid half a percentage point to 56.6 last month while the sub-index gauging projections for the economy six months from now was unchanged at 64.8 for the month.
"The Future Index of the BCI is now almost 10 points higher than the Current Index, which sends a clear signal that Massachusetts employers anticipate a strong economic recovery," Michael Goodman, acting provost at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth and a member of AIM's Board of Economic Advisors, said. "Absent some unexpected disruption to the vaccine rollout or the emergence of vaccine-resistant viral variants, we can expect our robust recovery to continue."
AIM said that many companies that responded to the business confidence survey mentioned "the challenges of hiring and retaining skilled workers." A different AIM survey last month found that 60 percent of employers currently have job openings and 53 percent cannot find qualified workers to fill those vacancies.
Some Massachusetts businesses are chomping at the bit to get back to more normal operations. Though Gov. Charlie Baker last week laid out a multi-step process to phase out business restrictions by August, businesses have said they will be put at a disadvantage if the Massachusetts economy doesn't reopen widely as soon as neighboring states. This week, New York, New Jersey and Connecticut announced that they will let most businesses in their states fully reopen in mid-May.
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