Posts Tagged ‘Rhode Island’
Wednesday, November 4th, 2009
From today’s Providence Journal: The end of the “Great Recession” is in sight, but economic recovery in Rhode Island will lag behind its New England neighbors and the rest of the nation, according to Andres Carbacho-Burgos, an economist with Moody’s Economy.com.
“Rhode Island, like the rest of the United States, is emerging from the Great Recession,” he said to a collection of the state’s top budget officials Wednesday morning, describing the Ocean State’s economic problems as the “second-worst recession in Rhode Island History in terms of proportional job losses.” Only 1991 was worse.
Rhode Island’s rate of recovery, however, will be the slowest since the Great Depression, Carbacho-Burgos said, downgrading his projections of six months ago.
The news was not altogether unexpected, but suggests that state budget deficits — and pressure on lawmakers to cut programs and raise taxes — will continue to grow in the coming months.
Tags: Economy, Great Depression, Jobs, recovery, Rhode Island
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Friday, October 23rd, 2009
From today’s Providence Journal: Governor Carcieri’s administration director, Gary Sasse, gave a roomful of state senators a list of “two to three things” to do over the next few months as the state tries to climb out of its financial abyss. The first was: “pray.
The next was: “Need positive attitude. No naysayers,” according to the notes kept by one of the senators at the meeting last week.
The third was a variation on a key piece of an ambitious proposal to solve deficit-racked California’s budget crisis: lower the tax burden on the wealthy, repeal sales taxes and replace the corporate profits tax with a new levy pegged to business revenues.
Tags: development, Economic Outlook, growth, Rhode Island, Taxes
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Friday, October 16th, 2009
From this morning’s Providence Journal: Rhode Island’s unemployment rate has hit a new high, fulfilling experts’ predictions that the state’s job market will get worse before it gets any better.
The jobless rate reached 13 percent in September, up from 12.8 percent in August, according to a report issued Friday by the state Department of Labor and Training. The latest stop on a seemingly inexorable climb that started three years ago set yet another record since the federal government began tracking the number of unemployed workers in 1976.
Economists who once projected that the rate would hit its apex this year now believe it will continue to rise through the end of 2010.
“In the spring, our forecast was very optimistic,” said Edinaldo Tebaldi, assistant professor of economics at Bryant University. “It turned out to be wrong.”
Tags: Department of Labor, Jobs, Rhode Island, unemployment
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Tuesday, September 22nd, 2009
From the Providence Journal: More than 3 percent of Rhode Island’s population — some 33,000 men, women and children — fell into poverty in 2008 as the recession tightened its grip on the Ocean State, according to recent figures from the U.S. Census Bureau.
From 2007 to 2008, Rhode Island displaced Massachusetts as the New England state with the highest poverty rate. The state also leapfrogged Maine and Vermont in the process, going from fourth-highest to highest in the six-state region.
Tags: Census, employment, Jobs, poverty, Rhode Island
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