Skip to main content

Report Identifies 'Major Concern' in Otherwise Booming MA Economy

The Donahue Institute at the University of Massachusetts, named in honor of the late Maurice A. Donahue of Holyoke, who served as president of the Massachusetts Senate (1964-71) and ran unsuccessfully for governor in the 1970 Democratic primary, issues a quarterly report on the state of our economy called MassBenchmarks. The latest one came out this past Friday, July 27, describing, in unequivocal detail, a Massachusetts economy that had expanded at a “torrid pace” in April, May and June.

“The Massachusetts economy accelerated sharply in the second quarter,” the report states, “bucking the expectation of slower growth due to low unemployment and demographic constraints.” 
Here are some highlights:

-The state’s gross domestic product grew at a 7.3% annualized rate while, nationally, it increased by 4.1%.
 
-The number of payroll jobs expanded at a rate of 2.9%, compared to a 1.7% rate for the rest of the U.S.

-Wage and salary income, as measured by state tax collections, grew by 6.2%.

-Consumer spending grew by 6.7%, as measured by regular sales tax receipts and motor vehicle sales taxes.

-Unemployment remained at “a near historical low” of 3.5%.

Job growth in the technology and knowledge-based sectors was especially strong, the report noted, and many of the new jobs in these areas “were filled by workers who either migrated to the state or remained in the state after moving here to go to college.”
The incomes “generated by these relatively well-paid jobs,” the report said, “can be expected to boost demand for jobs in all sectors, many of them in more moderately-paid or lower-paid service roles.”

In the category of job growth, however, the report did identify a “major concern” going forward: the capacity of the state to “provide all of these new workers with adequate housing and transportation options...”  What that means, obviously, is:
If mass transit (MBTA and commuter rail) is not seriously upgraded, if traffic congestion in and around Boston is not at least somewhat mitigated, and if the supply of housing in eastern Massachusetts is not sufficiently expanded to halt the so-far-unstoppable rise in housing prices, we won’t be able to attract and keep the highly educated and skilled workforce that is now the main driver of our economy.

MassBenchmarks is published by the Donahue Institute in cooperation with the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston.

For more on the report, go to:
http://www.massbenchmarks.org

 

 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Historical Significance Had Little Heft on the Scale of Progress in Booming Malden

The First Church in Malden, Congregational, a once-cherished emblem of the history of Malden, Massachusetts, was wiped out a few weeks ago for the sake of a new downtown development. The site of the church was contiguous to the Malden Government Center complex (city hall and police headquarters), which had been built in the mid-1970s in the middle of Pleasant Street in an attempt to create a pedestrian shopping mall from that point down to where Pleasant Street spills in to Main Street.   It turned out to be an ill-conceived and ridiculously hopeful project: no mall ever materialized.   For years, the people of Malden yearned to correct that colossal mistake by demolishing the Government Center and reopening the entire length of Pleasant Street to the smooth flow of vehicular traffic.   Enter the Jefferson Apartment Group of Virginia in 2015.   It proposed spending $100 million to demolish the Government Center; replace it with apartments, offices and hundreds of par...
Post a Comment
Read more

Ethics Chief Gets Permanent Appointment; Case Overview Shows Agency's Vital Role

A week ago today, on Feb. 17, the Massachusetts State Ethics Commission announced the appointment of David A. Wilson as its executive director, where he’s responsible for administering and enforcing the state’s conflict of interest and financial disclosure laws. A graduate of Columbia University School of Law and Brandeis University in Waltham, Wilson is kind of a fixture of Massachusetts government, having been an attorney on the Ethics Commission staff for three decades.   For the past eight months, he’d been serving as the commission’s acting executive director.   He needs no warm-up for this big role. The commission is composed of five members, three appointed by the governor and one each appointed by the secretary of state and attorney general.   All of the current commissioners are attorneys, and three of them are retired judges: Barbara Dortch-Okara, Regina Quinlan and David Mills. (The non-judge lawyer-members are Thomas Sartory and Maria Krokidas. Wilson’s appoin...
Post a Comment
Read more

Boston Municipal Research Bureau 'Update' Has Me Thinking Thoughts of PILOTS

I always thought that hospitals and universities owned most of the tax-exempt land in the City of Boston.   Boy was I mistaken. The total area of Boston consists of 47.84 square miles.   Of that total, 49 percent, or 23.44 square miles is tax-exempt.   And of those 23.44 tax-exempt square miles, only 4.98 square miles are owned by institutions devoted to medicine and health care, higher education, cultural pursuits and worship (churches, synagogues, mosques), etc.   The rest is mainly owned by the government. I got this information from the latest (10-3-17) “Bureau Update” from the Boston Municipal Research Bureau, an independent organization that’s been keeping tabs on Boston’s finances since 1932.   Thank you, BMRB. Here are some other things I gleaned: The state government owns 48.5% of all the tax-exempt land in the city. The city and federal governments own, respectively, 28.6%  and 1.6% of all the tax-exempt land. The total assessed value of al...
Post a Comment
Read more