Economist sees ‘long, hard grind’ ahead for Edmonton
EDMONTON Edmontonians reached the height of their economic prosperity in 2014, took a major hit after that, and won’t reach that 2014 level again until the 2030s, says John Rose, chief economist of the City of Edmonton.
“It’s going to be a long hard grind, and for a lot of people it’s going to be a real adjustment to get used to the fact that we’re not going back into another boom,” Rose said, speaking to reporters at the Economic Society of Northern Alberta conference in Edmonton.
Prosperity is measured in our Gross Domestic Product per capita. “You have to think of that as the total resources available for an individual in the city of Edmonton, and that’s for government to provide services to that individual, for their income, for their savings and for their housing,” Rose said. “That flow of wealth, GDP per capita, peaked in 2014 and came down quite significantly in 2015 and 2016 as the Edmonton economy contracted and our population continued to grow.”
A slow recovery is now going on, with GDP rising in a modest manner and projected to do so into the future, but the city’s population also continues to rise.
“When you average the available GDP, the available wealth, across the population, it’s slow to recover,” Rose said. “Right now, given the longer-term estimates we have for GDP in the city of Edmonton, we’re talking the 2030s before we get back to the levels of GDP per capita, level of overall wealth available to support an individual citizen that we had in 2014.”
Per capita GDP is $67,302 in Edmonton in 2018, compared to $50,918 in the rest of Canada. The Alberta average is $74,687 for 2018.