Across the United States, a persistent surge in business applications has been a surprising feature of the COVID-era economy. Has this upswing in entrepreneurial activity been evident in North Carolina as well? This article explores the U.S. Census Bureau’s Business Formation Statistics (BFS) data to describe the trend in application activity across North Carolina and its counties.
Topics Related to Economic Trend
In this edition of NC Economy Watch, we review some of 2023’s key economic trends and speculate on how these trends might evolve in the year to come. Slower economic growth and lower price inflation have led to widespread expectation that interest rates will finally start to ease in 2024. We’ll be watching for signs of how far interest rates might fall and whether our economy will experience a soft landing, a hard landing, or no landing at all in the months ahead.
In this edition of NC Economy Watch, we provide some context for the recent manufacturing slowdown. The manufacturing sector experienced turbulence during the past year and has declined as a share of the North Carolina economy since the 1980s, but a nationwide surge of new investment in manufacturing facilities offers hope for a potential renaissance in the years to come.
This is the third article in LEAD’s recent Manufacturing series, which explores North Carolina’s Industry 4.0 assets.
LEAD recently released the NC Racial Equity Dashboard that examines demographic and economic data by race and ethnicity statewide, as well as by county for select measures. While this blog highlights three key findings from the dashboard to get you started, we encourage you to investigate the data on your own to uncover further valuable insights.
In our last edition of NC Economy Watch, we described some of the ways in which our economy has changed during the COVID-19 pandemic. In this edition, we examine aspects of our economy that have not changed during the COVID-19 pandemic. For the most part, people are still working in the same industries; the labor market is tightening at the same pace; and the rise of e-commerce is where we’d expect it to be based on trends that preceded the pandemic.
In this edition of NC Economy Watch, we examine some of the ways our economy has changed during the COVID-19 pandemic, including the rise of remote work and a resurgence of entrepreneurship.
In this edition of NC Economy Watch, we assess whether the economy is heading for a hard crash or a “soft landing”. The economic slowdown over the past year has been “soft”; although our economy is slowing, it’s still growing and showing no signs of a recession. Inflation has also slowed notably, but a “landing” is elusive as prices continue to rise.
In this edition of NC Economy Watch, we check in on labor market conditions in our state. Fewer workers are quitting their jobs now than during the peak of the so-called “Great Resignation”. While this might suggest conditions are starting to normalize, other evidence shows our labor market remains out of balance, with still too many job openings and not enough jobseekers.
Employment in Leisure and Hospitality has grown nearly 25% since January 2013 to nearly 530,000 jobs in NC. This growth was severely disrupted by COVID but jobs were recovered by January 2023 and are now surpassing Pre-COVID levels.