Tuesday, February 2, 2010

Grimes on bright spots for Michigan

University of Michigan economist Donald Grimes will be on this afternoon's Economic Recovery Forum panel in Sarasota. Here he is interviewed on hopeful sectors for Michigan in the current downturn:

Do you see any hopeful sectors for Michigan? You have previously talked about health care as strength in particular in Oakland County.
There's an amazing number of hopeful sectors actually in Michigan. As part of the study with the Research Seminar for Quantitative Economics that I was involved in, I believe we found 280 private-sector industries that between 2002 and 2007 actually grew faster in terms of employment growth in Michigan than they did nationally. That's a staggering number I never would have expected. Health care was one of the aggregate industry groups. There was also some that were in medical product manufacturing, pharmaceutical product manufacturing, agricultural and foodstuff manufacturing. It was in a wide variety of industries. Even semiconductors in Michigan were doing better than they were nationally.

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