HOBART — For about 20 years, Northwest Indiana added a net of 50 new businesses per year.
The last five years, the Region has gained a net of 500 new businesses a year, said Indiana University Northwest Associate Professor of Economics Micah Pollak said.
"There's tremendous growth in new business," he said. "Cook County, which has an economy 12 times the size, added about as many as Northwest Indiana did."
Pollak and other Indiana University economists presented the Futurecast 2025 at Avalon Manon in Hobart Friday. They projected what the economy will look like in the Region, state and nation next year, also making prognostications about financial markets.
"When you look at the categories where businesses are growing, the number one sector is called professional, scientific and professional services," Pollak said. "Hopefully you'll keep hearing about it a lot. It's a lot of white-collar, high-paying professional jobs like law, accounting, architecture, design, engineering, design, computer systems, management, consulting, advertising, PR and high-paying jobs that are desirable to bring into the Region. In manufacturing, we've been losing a lot of high-paying good jobs and we need something to replace it. We have food service coming in and retail coming in but we really need high-paying jobs to pick up the slack."
Brian Vander Schee, a clinical associate professor of marketing at IU, said gross domestic product was growing and expected to grow at 2% next year. He said employment should remain steady with employment growth remaining at around 1% over the next 18 months and the unemployment rate increasing in the first half of next year but staying below 5%.
"We expect there will be an equilibrium in the supply and demand of labor," he said. "That bodes well for our inflation model."
Inflation is predicted to near 2.3% in 2025. Job creation is expected to decline to about 130,000 a month but pick up later in the year.
Russel Rhoades, a clinical associate professor of financial management at IU's Kelley School of Business, said the stock markets have had a few good years, with 15 new highs in 2024.
"Once every four days, we get a new all-time high in the S&P 500," he said. "We are at the high-end valuation of stocks. There are a lot of different ways to measure that."
Carol Rogers, the director of the Indiana Business Research Center, said people have kept buying even with inflation, driving gross domestic product growth. Wage growth and personal income have grown in Indiana, but job growth has been tempered, she said.
"There was a disconnect between what people were doing, which was helping GDP growth and helping Indiana manufacturing, and the pain they felt while they were doing that," she said. "I think the wallet felt really hot. What we do every day really affects the economy. The economy has been cooling down. The Fed feels it's done its job slowing down employment growth. That's going to affect us more next year than it did in 2024."
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