A respected University of Michigan economic report says Michigan’s post-COVID-19 recovery is already underway and will likely continue.
But it also says a full recovery may take a while.
Gabriel Ehrlich leads the U of M Research Seminar in Quantitative Economics. State government relies heavily on it in its decisions.“We expect job growth to pick up very nicely through the rest of this year and into next year, and then as we get closer to a full recovery, we do expect job growth to start slowing down a little. But our forecast is for Michigan’s job count to get back to where it was before the pandemic about the end of 2023.”
He says while the state’s employment will spike, that’s only part of the story.
“We’re still in a pretty deep hole. We should start climbing out pretty quickly here, but just because of how much we have to climb, it’s really going to be another two and a half years before we get back to where we were before the pandemic.”
Ehrlich says this projection assumes vaccination rates improve and that a new variant doesn’t up-end the pandemic recovery.
It also assumes there are no new supply chain issues that would slow down getting parts to factories.
Ehrlich says Michigan is better positioned than it was after the Great Recession because the fundamentals of the economy were in good shape before the COVID-19 pandemic.
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