ATLANTA, GA – Since taking office, Gov. Nathan Deal has budgeted conservatively, downsized state government, implemented real tax reform and created nearly 300,000 private-sector jobs as Georgia rebounded from the Great Recession. A prediction from a Georgia State University economist in today’s Atlanta Journal-Constitution suggests the governor’s policies are working. Director of the Georgia State Economic Forecasting Center Rajeev Dhawan tells the AJC that Georgia’s economic growth will be solid in the coming years.
“This prediction, alongside several other positive economic indicators and a top-ranked business climate, proves we are moving in the right direction,” said Deal. “I’ve made it my priority to create jobs for Georgia citizens because job growth is essential to increasing quality of life and ensuring the economic vitality of our state.”
“The Peach State job engine is indeed humming,” said Dhawan. “Debt is down, job creation is up, and with consumers accounting for more than two-thirds of the economy, the expansion has entered a more encouraging phase.”
Dhawan predicts Georgia will finish this calendar year with 74,100 more jobs, one-fifth of them being well-paying, “premium” jobs. And in 2015, the state economy will add 83,600 jobs, with about the same proportion of them categorized as “premium.”
To match the state’s top-ranked workforce with a steady stream of premium jobs, Deal this year created the Governor’s High Demand Career Initiative, which regularly brings together the heads of Economic Development, our university and technical college systems and key leaders in private-sector industries to hear directly from the employers about their future employment needs. It also gives our institutions of education the chance to get ahead of the curve in preparing tomorrow’s workforce.
Dhawan predicts that job growth will be concentrated in professional and business services, but manufacturing, education and healthcare will all expand. He also discounted the past several months of official job reports, telling the AJC that unemployment is the most misleading statistic to measure the health of the economy.
Source: Governor’s Office of Georgia
