Job loss will continue in Connecticut through 2011, according to the latest quarterly economic forecast by UConn’s Connecticut Center for Economic Analysis (CCEA), and growth may not resume until 2012 or even later. 
The state’s budget crisis will only worsen the problem, the report said. The good news—this outlook is “slightly better” than the last quarterly forecast.
“There is a no jobs recovery in sight,” the report said. “Assuming national growth trails off from the unsustainable 5.7 percent of the fourth quarter,
Connecticut continues to lose jobs through 2011. The rate of loss simply slows from the predicted rate in the previous CCEA Outlook.”
The report said the state’s economy has undergone a critical structural change as the degree of outsourcing—whether to other states or abroad—has grown quickly for more than a decade. The result is that even strong growth in total output may not translate into rapid improvement in employment.
The effect shows in a pattern of progressively slowed jobs recovery, according to the report.
Before 1990, Connecticut’s economy recovered jobs lost in recessions in 10 months or less. Recovery took 23 months and then 39 months in the last two recessions, it said.
“Unless the state adopts policies and makes strategic investments to change this progressively deteriorating pattern, a jobs recovery may never arrive,” the report said.
