JOHN REITMEYER | JUNE 28, 2017
Executives are perturbed about New Jersey’s high taxes and the state government’s approach to business
New Jersey’s top business leaders are optimistic about the direction that the national economy is heading in this year, but as the state gets ready to elect a new governor, they are more cautious about New Jersey’s own immediate economic future.
The results of a new survey released yesterday by Rutgers University’s Real Estate and Policy Research Consortium revealed that enthusiasm among the state’s top business leaders has returned to the levels measured before the onset of the Great Recession in 2007, with 60 percent expecting some improvement in the national economy over the next 12 months.
At the same time, the survey found the executives still have concerns about New Jersey’s high taxes and state government’s handling of business policies, with nearly 50 percent saying they expect the state’s economic conditions to only remain about the same over the next year.
The results of the survey, outlined yesterday during a conference held at Rutgers University’s Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy in New Brunswick, emerge as New Jersey remains locked in a pattern of slow growth in the wake of the recession, which officially ended in 2009. New Jersey only recently added back all of the private-sector jobs that were lost to the recession as the annual rate of growth here has trailed that of the national economy, while the federal job losses were all recovered in 2014.