Ohio’s economic recovery is inching along so slowly that, given the current rate of job creation, the state remains nearly five years away from regaining all of the jobs vanquished in the Great Recession.
The news is grimmer for the state’s most populous and productive county. Cuyahoga County, which lost 120,000 jobs last decade, is on track to achieve full recovery sometime in 2023.
That’s according to an analysis of employment trends by Chmura Economics & Analytics, an economic forecasting firm in Cleveland.
“We’re recovering, but it’s going to be a lot of years before we get back to where we were,” said Daniel Meges, the economist who calculated the forecast using a decade of state and federal employment data.
Meges said he analyzed job figures back to 2003 to capture the employment picture when most communities reached peak employment last decade, as well as their job numbers at the recession’s depths and the most recent figures reflecting the first quarter of 2013.
The glacial pace of Ohio’s recovery surprised him.
“We still have a fair amount of employment to recapture,” he said.
Like, about 280,000 jobs. That’s how many jobs Ohio must generate to return to the third quarter of 2006, when employment for the decade peaked at 5.3 million people working.
Assuming the state gains about 5,000 jobs a month — the average for the past 30 months — Ohio will return to peak performance in four years and eight months, Meges calculated.
Cuyahoga County — which has been averaging 500 new jobs a month — is looking at a much longer journey. The county will need a decade to add 70,000 jobs and return to its 770,000 employment peak of 2003.
Meges notes the job picture could brighten considerably with just a little more hum in the local economy.
“We could add 1,000 jobs a month” and recover in five years, he said. “If we had a really good string, we could add 2,000. Then you cut that five years in half.”
Walter Simmons, chair of the economics and finance department at John Carroll University, said a conservative estimate is best.
“Not to be pessimistic, but a five to 10-year horizon is realistic,” he said.
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