New Haven Register (Sunday) (New Haven, CT)
State forecasts 200K new jobs within decade
State Labor Department officials are projecting Connecticut’s economy will have added more than 201,100 jobs through 2030 compared to employment levels in 2020.
The decade-long employment growth rate is expected to be 12 percent. The Connecticut increase is 4.3 percent higher than the U.S. projection of 7.7 percent.
Patrick Flaherty, the Connecticut Labor Department’s director of research, said the growth rate is directly related to the jobs lost during the pandemic. The state was hit hard during the pandemic, with nearly 290,000 jobs lost, but has since had a stable and steady recovery, according to Flaherty.
The largest employment gain in Connecticut’s economy are expected to come in the accommodation and food Services sector, which is expected to add nearly 35,000 jobs between 2020 and 2030. If that occurs, it would represent a growth rate of 33.4 percent.
After the accommodation and food services sector, the next largest employment growth is expected to come in health care.
The sector is expected to 20,455 jobs in Connecticut through 2030. That represents a 9.5 percent growth rate over 2020 levels.
Within the health care sector, the majority of the employment growth over the course of the current decade is expected to come from ambulatory health care services. Such services are defined as any health care activity that is performed on an outpatient basis, like diagnostic tests, treatments, or rehab visits.
Employment levels at hospitals in the state as well as at nursing and residential care are expected to add only 3,000 jobs in each category.
The sector with the third largest
amount of employment growth is expected to be transportation and warehousing.
The sector will see an increase of 20,306 jobs by the end of the decade compared 2020 levels. That would represent a 35 percent increase.
Donald Klepper-Smith, an economist with South Carolina-based DataCore Partners, however, said state officials are being “far too optimistic” in their employment growth projections.
“Historically, non-farm employment has grown at a rate of about 1 percent,” KlepperSmith said. “State officials are talking about a growth rate of about 1.5 percent at a time when there is structural change going on in our economy.”
Despite the projected gains in the Connecticut economy overall, the data regarding the state’s manufacturing sector has a potentially troubling spot.
Manufacturing represented 9.1 percent of overall employment in the state in 2020. That is a larger percentage than in adjacent states or the U.S. overall, according to Connecticut labor officials.
But the state’s manufacturing sector is only expected to add 13,981 jobs through 2030.
Every sector of the state’s economy is seeing automation, Klepper-Smith said.
“Unless you have a real strong sense that new economic engines are coming to the fore, I’d take these numbers with a grain of salt,” KlepperSmith said.