NEW: RI Economy Still Expanding

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Monday, May 09, 2011

GoLocalProv News Team

A new report says Rhode Island is staying on the road to economic recovery.

The Current Economic Indicator released today says that the economy increased by 1.9 percent in the first quarter of 2011—about the same rate as the third and fourth quarters of 2010. (The Current Economic Indicator is a new metric produced by Bryant University and the Rhode Island Public Expenditure Council.)

The indicator also projects that the economy will expand by 1.8 percent over the next two quarters.

“These figures confirm that the state’s economy has been expanding, but the labor market has yet to rebound,” the report states. “Economic expansion usually precedes job growth. Job creation will be quite slow in Rhode Island as the current and the short-term rates of economic growth are relatively small.”

More about the indicator: The quarterly CEI, developed by economists at Bryant University, combines several key gauges of economic activity in a single statistic that measures the overall current economic conditions in Rhode Island. It is calibrated to grow at the rate of the Real Gross State Product and therefore can be interpreted as the underlying growth rate of the state economy. The CEI is calculated using the most current available data for the state.

Click here to read the full report.

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