Verde Independent
Howard Fischer
PHOENIX — Arizona’s economy won’t recover until more people move here, but more people won’t move here until the unemployment rate drops.
That conundrum was pretty much the consensus Wednesday of a panel trying to read the tea leaves about what the state’s economy will look like in 2014 and beyond. And the bottom line is that the state will see about a 2 to 2.5 percent growth, in line with the slow recovery seen this year and far below what was the pre-recession pattern.
The underlying problem is that the state economy remains linked to more people.
“We’ve always depended on population flows to be one of the key drivers of any recovery,’ said Lee McPheters, a professor at the W.P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University. “We’ve never had any recovery that was not accompanied by population flows from other states.’
And Elliott Pollack who runs an economic and real estate consulting firm said that the rate of growth is about half of what it was a decade ago.
The problem, though, is that some of that is beyond Arizona’s own control. Continue reading
