THESE ARE FOR TEASERS TO OTHER STORIES INSIDE:
36 percent
Number of small business owners in metro Atlanta who expect to add employees in 2013, best in the U.S., according to Bank of America. TEASE TO 111512 SMALL BIZ
66.76
Atlanta's score on a 100-point scale measuring financial distress, according to CredAbility. A score below 70 signifies distress. TEASE TO 111512 DISTRESS
16 percent
The increase in Georgia foreclosure starts from September and October, according to RealtyTrac, in sour news for the state's real estate market. TEASE TO 111512 FORECLOSURES
Forget 2013 already.
Not until the following year will Georgia’s economy pick up steam and create enough jobs to effectively put the recession and its lukewarm recovery in the rearview mirror, one of Atlanta’s most prominent economic prognosticators said Wednesday.
“2013 is already done and gone. The damage is already done,” said Rajeev Dhawan, director of the Economic Forecasting Center at Georgia State University. “2014 will be fabulous … I love 2014.”
Dhawan, who held his quarterly forecasting conference Wednesday, estimated that metro Atlanta will add 40,900 jobs next year, a slight uptick from his prediction for 2012.
Jeff Humphreys, a University of Georgia forecaster, puts the number closer to 37,000 jobs, a 1.6 percent increase over this year.
Both economists blame Washington gridlock and and the looming “fiscal cliff” that creates a bunker mentality among CEOs and more financial uncertainty for U.S. households.
Slowing exports to Europe and cooling growth in China also contribute to the cloudier outlook for 2013.
Congress and the White House must come up with a $560 billion reduction in the federal deficit by January 1 — via a slew of spending cuts or tax increases — or the economy could return to recession with 2 million jobs lost, according to the Congressional Budget Office. A later-in-the-year compromise, though, is a possibility.
“We won’t go off the cliff full throttle, but we will have some austerity kicking in,” said Humphreys, who runs UGA’s Selig Center for Economic Growth. “And the austerity will bite more deeply in 2014 than 2013.”
Atlanta has all but recovered the tens of thousands of jobs lost during the recession. In September, Atlanta’s labor force stood at 2.7 million people — almost exactly the number of workers and job seekers as before the recession began in late 2007.
The metro unemployment rate in September was 8.4 percent, the lowest level in nearly four years, although that’s partly due to thousands of Atlantans who gave up the job search.
The state labor department will release the October jobless rate Thursday.
A rush of economic headwinds, beyond the fiscal cliff, threatens the state’s unemployment picture as well as its potential for growth. They include the European debt crisis; a less-robust Chinese economy; U.S. corporate belt-tightening; worldwide drought’s impact on food prices; and still-slow construction activity, particularly in the Southeast.
Dhawan predicts Georgia’s overall economic growth at 2.1 percent this year, rising to 2.5 percent in 2013.
Roger Tutterow, an economics professor at Mercer University, says that’s a bit optimistic.
“Economic activity will possibly be sluggish early in the year,” said Tutterow. “There’s still a lot of uncertainty regarding the current fiscal health. But once we get beyond the year, we’ll probably revert to historical averages of growth.”
Dhawan predicts 54,000 jobs will be created in Atlanta in 2014, while Humphreys says 39,000. Virtually every private sector industry— construction, business services, financial, health, hospitality and trade — is expected to add jobs in 2014.
“I just don’t want to talk about 2013,” Dhawan said Wednesday. “If we could skip it, I’d love it.”
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