Connecticut was more severely impacted by the Great Recession than many states and, as a result, its residents are not seeing the same kind of recovery that is happening elsewhere, according to a recent study conducted by business students at Sacred Heart University in Fairfield.
Sixteen students from SHU’s John F. Welch College of Business spent their spring semester on an economic outlook for Connecticut for 2015-17 in Lucjan T. Orlowski”™s economic and financial forecasting class.
Two representatives of the group, Kimberly Ball and Adrien Viani, recently presented their findings during a forum at the Frank and Marisa Martire Business & Communications Center at SHU.
Besides a slow recovery from the recession, the students reported Connecticut is also lagging behind the rest of the country when it comes to employment. Connecticut”™s rate of 6.4 percent unemployment is above the national average of 5.5 percent and places the state 42nd in overall unemployment rankings.
The students said Connecticut has lost 12,000 jobs in the financial sector and 45,000 jobs in manufacturing since the recession began. And many of the new jobs replacing them are in low-skill, low-pay areas, indicating that while numbers show improvement, income and tax revenue growth will not increase significantly.
Regarding the housing market, the students found that prices for homes in Connecticut are close to double the national averages for comparable properties and tax rates are prohibitively high compared with major cities in other states. They found home ownership has fallen from 70.5 percent in 2009 to 67.4 percent in 2014, while rental vacancy rates have steadily declined.
The study also cited weakness in the banking sector, with in-state institutions lagging behind national competitors on several metrics, including growth of net interest ”“ 1.075 percent in-state and 45.79 percent outside ”“ and equity-to-capital ratios, where Connecticut institutions lag by 1 percent.
In addition to Ball and Viani, participating students included Adria Abboud, John Brownell, Kenneth Byram, Matthew Cole, James Cooksey, Kyle Czarnecki, Anthony Dolisi, Jonathan Flood, Scott Gaffney, Vincent Iannitelli, Margaret McCabe, Raymond Satagaj, Steven Sullivan and Emma Trapani.
