Professor: Region's Recovery To Be Slow
The New England economy will continue to be poor throughout this year and will show only modest improvement in 2010, according to the vice president of the New England Economic Partnership.
At the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston today, Ross Gittell released his spring economic forecast entitled "Can We Afford The Future? The Fiscal and Economic Outlook for New England."
According to Gittell, New England will lose more than 450,000 jobs and employment will hit its low point in the second quarter of 2010 before improvements are noticed. He expects the six-state region's unemployment rate to rise to a peak of about 9.2 percent by that time, a full percentage point below the expected peak national unemployment rate.
Gittell, a professor of management at the University of New Hampshire, said the peak unemployment rate will be highest in Rhode Island at 10.9 percent. The Ocean State will be followed by Maine, Massachusetts, Vermont, Connecticut and New Hampshire, which all are expected to record peak unemployment rates between 8.9 percent and 9.7 percent.
The health services and education sectors are expected to come out of the recession before others because of the nature of demand for those services and because those sectors are more closely tied to necessity rather than the business cycle.
Still, Gittell said the health services sector will be stung by an increase in demand coupled with a decline in patients' ability to pay for those services.
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