Maine’s population declined in 2009 and 2010. It barely grew at all in 2011. So it makes sense that we don’t have any job growth right? Wrong. We still have to recover 25,000 jobs lost during the recession before population growth matters at all for job growth.
We’ve got about the same number of people we did in 2007, before the recession.
Over the same time period, we’ve lost about 25,000 jobs.
So, we should be able to add 25,000 more jobs over the coming years without the population growing at all. We’ve still got an enormous hole to climb out of. At that point, population growth will limit job growth. Right now, it doesn’t.
