Hawai'i lags in job growth

By Bob Anez
Associated Press

HELENA, Mont. — Job growth in Montana will be nothing to cheer about this year, but still will be one of the highest in the country, while Hawai'i's will be the worst, a national economic consulting firm says.

Regional Financial Associates Inc., a Pennsylvania-based consulting company that specializes in economic analysis and forecasting, predicted yesterday that jobs in Montana will increase by 1 percent in 2002. Only Florida and Idaho are expected to fare as well.

The Montana forecast represents a marked slowdown from a pace of more than 2 percent in 1999 and 2000, but is the far better than what the company expects nationally and for some other states.

Jobs will decline nationwide by half a percent this year, a turnaround from 2001 when the growth was 0.4 percent.

The states expected to do the worst this year are Hawai'i, a job loss of 2.7 percent; Georgia, down 1.3 percent; Illinois, down 1.1 percent; and Connecticut and Massachusetts, a 1 percent drop in jobs.

Hawai'i, hard-hit by the downturn in tourism since Sept. 11, has seen hundreds of jobs cut and workers' hours reduced, many in tourism-related industries such as hotels, restaurants and retail.

The 1 percent growth in Montana would mean the addition of about 4,000 jobs this year.

That compares with a 0.09 percent increase of 3,500 jobs in 2001, a 2.08 percent increase of 8,100 jobs the years before, and a 2.45 percent growth of 9,300 jobs in 1999.

Regional Financial Associates also said Montana is one of only eight states considered to have not fallen into a recession with the rest of the country. The others are Alaska, Florida, Virginia, and four Rocky Mountain states: Idaho, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming.

Paul Polzin, director for the Montana Bureau of Business and Economic Research in Missoula, said yesterday that the outlook offered by RFA mirrors his view of the state.

"Montana's economy may be slowing down, but everyone else is slowing done much worse than we are," he said. "It's confirmation of our analysis that Montana continues to dodge the recession bullet."

The reason is that Montana has few or none of the financial institutions and manufacturing industries that are hardest hit by the recession and economic fallout from the Sept. 11 attacks, Polzin said.