POUGHKEEPSIE – The overall economy is hurting more, and healing slower. That’s the gist of a fact-filled presentation delivered Thursday morning to the Dutchess County Economic Development Corporation, at their quarterly meeting in Poughkeepsie.
Dr. Christy Caridi, a Marist economics professor, told local business leaders that employment peaked in July 2008, and bottomed in December 2009. It took 44 months to recapture 41 percent of jobs eliminated during the “Great Recession.”
“It’s taking us much longer to recover from the Great Recession, than it did from the previous recession which happened in 2001,” Caridi said. “It’s going to take us many additional years to recover our labor force, our employment, and private sector jobs.”
Caridi said there is a lack of confidence, and “when you start adding all these things together, the base on what we were working off of was very weak.”