In the summer of 2008, before the crash, before the Great Recession, before, well, before a whole lot of the changes that now define the Rhode Island economy, PBN began its biannual Business Survey.
The idea behind the survey was to take the pulse of the community and to track how it changed over time, giving Rhode Island businesses a sense of how their peers were faring but also what their expectations for the future were.
As you can imagine, by the second edition of the survey, taken in the winter of 2009, business sentiment in the state had plummeted. It was the trough of the recession, with the fewest percentage of respondents saying they expected to hire anyone or expected their business to improve in the coming 12 months. It was not pretty.
Move forward to today, and the mood is most definitely more optimistic, although not quite as much as one might expect.
After hitting highs last year in many areas, the turmoil on the national scene seems to have infected the mindset of the Ocean State business community. Yes, many of the region’s business leaders see better times ahead, and as a result plan to hire people and make capital investments. It’s just not as many as have done in the recent past.
One experienced member of the community told us that Rhode Island is in a “wait-and-see situation.”
Businesses do their best planning (and investing) in a predictable environment, at times when the future seems most clearly visible on the horizon. With local and national elections coming soon, one can only hope that some more of that cloudy future will come in to focus soon.