Tennessee continues to climb out of the economic hole dug during the Great Recession, but employment in many sectors of the state’s economy may remain below pre-recession levels for another decade.
Overall employment in Tennessee is projected to return to its pre-recession peaks in another couple of years, but a new study suggests it will be 2022 until the number of retail, financial and information jobs returns to the 2007 peak levels reached before the recent economic downturn. Construction employment won’t get back to precession-levels until 2019, and manufacturing may never recover all of the jobs lost during the 2008-2010 downturn.
“The expectation for recovery in some sectors in Tennessee remains dismal,” said Dr. Stan Chervan, senior research consultant for the Tennessee Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations who authored a new study on the state’s “Long Road Back to Normal.” “Almost six years after the recession began, employment has yet to fully recover.”
Tennessee shed 220,000 jobs among 8.7 million jobs lost nationwide during the 2008-2010 recession, Chervan said. At the end of last year — two and a half years after the Great Recession officially ended — Tennessee had regained only about two-thirds of the jobs lost in the recession.
The Volunteer State has added more than 150,000 jobs in the past three years, and economists at the University of Tennessee expect employment to bounce back even stronger in 2014 and 2015 than in the current year.