BOSTON – Massachusetts’ real gross domestic product expanded at a 1.3% annualized rate in the fourth quarter of 2019, according to a MassBenchmarks report released on Thursday.
The national gross domestic product expanded at a 2.1% rate in that time.
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The report also noted that the Bureau of Economic Analysis said that state GDP increased at a 2.2% rate in the third quarter, instead of the 0.2% decline that MassBenchmarks estimated in October.
MassBenchmarks is a journal about the Massachusetts economy published by the UMass Donahue Institute, in collaboration with the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston.
The fourth quarter growth rate in Massachusetts was described as a “solid economic performance” in the report. Payroll employment increased by an annualized 1.5% and the unemployment rate declined to roughly 2.8%. Estimates showed that wage and salary income grew by an annualized 13.8%.
However, MassBenchmarks said that those numbers, “may be signaling a rosier picture of recent economic performance than warranted” and said that economic growth may have been slower than the indicating figures project.
Fourth quarter growth may have been attributable to tax receipts “spilling over” from the third quarter, the report said. It also noted that employment growth was slowing economic growth. Workers were said to be hard to come by due to low unemployment figures, including a decline in involuntary part-time workers and those marginally attached to the labor force.
“Another factor serving to limit the growth capacity of the commonwealth is the recent and sharp reduction in population growth due to a steep drop in immigration,” noted Alan Clayton-Matthews, MassBenchmarks senior contributing editor and an associate professor of economics and public policy at Northeastern University.
The report’s leading index also projected “slow growth” in the first half of this year, with Massachusetts GDP continuing to rise at a rate of 1.3% in the first and second quarters of 2020.
