PROVIDENCE – Massachusetts’ real gross domestic product grew 5.9 percent in the 2017 third quarter, according to the MassBenchmarks Current Economic Index released Friday by the UMass Donahue Institute’s economic journal MassBenchmarks in collaboration with the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston.
The national average GDP growth for the third quarter was 3 percent, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis.
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MassBenchmarks estimates that in the second quarter the Massachusetts economy grew 4.9 percent compared with a 3.1 percent national growth rate.
The report also noted that year over year both Massachusetts’ and the nation’s job growth rates were similar, at 1.5 percent and 1.4 percent, respectively.
“Labor markets appear to be nearly back to full employment levels,” said Alan Clayton-Matthews, MassBenchmarks senior contributing editor and associate professor of economics and public policy at Northeastern University.
The unemployment rate in Massachusetts in September was 3.9 percent, 0.3 percentage points lower than the national average.
“Despite these low unemployment rates and anecdotes about a shortage of workers, employment growth continues unabated without clear signs of wage rate pressures. It may be that the rapid growth in wage and salary income in Massachusetts is signaling the beginning of an acceleration in wage rates, but it’s too early to tell. Tax revenues can fluctuate from quarter to quarter for a variety of reasons that do not reflect an underlying trend,” Clayton-Matthews added.
The MassBenchmarks Leading Economic Index predicts that the state’s economy is expected to grow 3.3 percent in the fourth quarter of 2017 and 3 percent in the first quarter of 2018.
Chris Bergenheim is the PBN web editor.
