Long Range Plan, 2003 - 2007 : Job Growth & Unemployment 

According to figures cited in the Massachusetts Department of Employment and Training using Massachusetts Seasonally Adjusted Data, since l997, unemployment in the state has fluctuated between 3.7 and 2.3 percent, reaching an all time low in 2000. Beginning in June of 2001, the unemployment figure has risen a few percentage points each month. By September 2001 the figures had climbed to 3.9 percent and as of February 2002 the unemployment rate stands at 4.4 percent.

In a report published in 2000 by the Progressive Policy Institute's (PPI) "Technology & New Economy Project", over the past fifteen years, a "New Economy" has emerged in the United States which has fundamentally altered the industrial and occupational order. In the industrialized age, Massachusetts prospered by having workers who could perform jobs, which relied on hard labor, and repetitive and physically demanding jobs. Today's workers increasingly need a higher level of education, critical thinking skills and the ability to work in groups as a requirement for the new knowledge and information-based jobs. Advances in information technologies have reshaped and restructured the economy of Massachusetts and the country. Economists are increasingly using a new set of indicators which measure "knowledge jobs", "globalization", "economic dynamism and competition", "transformation to a digital economy" and "technological innovation capacity" to determine the viability of states and communities to participate. While workers in the Commonwealth have performed well on many of these new indicators, there is concern about the overall skill level of residents in the coming years based on educational data. (Source PPI web site http://www.ppionline.org/)