Nancy Mantell, director of the Rutgers Economic Advisory Service, or R/ECON, wasn’t bullish on New Jersey’s immediate employment future at a September conference. She said the state added 27,700 new jobs last year, which was 17,400 fewer than 2013.
Mantell’s long-range forecast is for statewide job increases averaging 0.8 percent a year over the next 30 years. But at that rate, she added, it will take until the middle of 2017 for New Jersey just to get back all the jobs it lost in the long-running national recession.