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The economic forecast for Berkeley, Jefferson and Morgan counties is that slow but solid job growth is ahead for the Eastern Panhandle, according to the West Virginia University College of Business and Economics.
“We expect a continued recovery from the effects of the job losses during the 2008 recession with the Eastern Panhandle outperforming most of West Virginia,” said Paul J. Speaker at the annual Eastern Panhandle Economic Outlook conference on Tuesday at the Holiday Inn in Martinsburg.
Speaker, spokesman for the College of Business and Economics, said West Virginia’s economy likely will continue to expand during the next five years.
“Expansion in the Eastern Panhandle is expected to outperform the nation with annual real GDP growth of 3.5 with the most significant gains in Jefferson and Berkeley counties. The forecast calls for the region’s job growth to average 1.5 percent per year and population growth of 1.6 percent through 2017,” Speaker said.
Speaker said job growth is expected to be particularly strong in the areas of professional and business services, education and health, and construction. The growth in construction reverses the severe declines in that sector during the recent recession, he said.
Most measures of income in the Eastern Panhandle fell during the recession and have been slow to recover in the last two years, but income growth is expected to “pick up speed over the next five years,” he said.
“We’re looking at real average annual growth rate of 1.8 percent between 2012 and 2017. It’s predicted to be above 2 percent growth for 2013 and afterward,” Speaker said, which “translates into an additional $2,700 of spending power, on average, for Eastern Panhandle residents by the end of the forecast period of 2017.”
Jose Flores, assistant general manager of Hollywood Casino at Charles Town Races, was hopeful that economic growth will continue in the Eastern Panhandle, and Anika Gaskins, the facility’s vice president of marketing, said it helps that nearby Virginia has a low unemployment rate since many customers come from Loudoun and Fairfax counties.
The national unemployment rate is dropping, “but only at a modest pace,” said Ray Owens, research adviser and senior economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, the keynote speaker at the conference.
Ann Legreid, dean of the School of Business and Social Sciences at Shepherd University, said the Shepherdstown, W.Va., college needs to work on increasing in-state enrollments, and she would like to see more apprenticeships and work-force development.
Jose Sartarelli, dean of WVU’s College of Business and Economics, said West Virginia needs to adequately train people for the drilling jobs available in the fracking industry that has sprung out of the Marcellus shale gas extraction. He said he believed a two-year associate’s degree should be sufficient to qualify for those jobs.
He said the motels around those sites are housing out-of-state workers from places such as Oklahoma and Texas, and the jobs should be going to West Virginians.