LAST WEEK, the federal government announced that Cambridge will be one of three hubs for ARPA-H, a new research funding agency for the health care sector. This is great news for the region’s economy, but celebrations are glossing over some of the fundamental issues holding Boston back as a startup and innovation center. To some, […]
Economy
Posted inHealth Care
House OKs pay range disclosure bill
STATE HOUSE NEWS SERVICE THE MASSACHUSETTS Legislature unanimously passed a law in 2016 to address the yawning gap between the wages paid to men and women doing the same work, a law that Rep. Christine Barber on Wednesday called “one of the strongest pay equity laws in the country.” But as she made the case […]
Posted inOpinion
Rein in the power of Visa, Mastercard
AS MASSACHUSETTS RESIDENTS face higher and higher costs of living and stubbornly high prices for gas, food, beverages, and other staple items, a bi-partisan coalition of senators is looking to give consumers and small businesses some much-needed relief. The Credit Card Competition Act would stop Visa and Mastercard from exacerbating inflation and hurting small business […]
Posted inEconomy
Unemployment rate hits lowest monthly level since 1976
STATE HOUSE NEWS SERVICE THE MASSACHUSETTS ECONOMY continues to hum along in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic’s disruption, a trend that business leaders and analysts say could forecast more inflationary pressure on the horizon. With employers across the state still struggling to fill open positions, labor officials reported Friday that the statewide unemployment rate […]
Posted inEconomy, Opinion
Here’s how to get people back to work, off unemployment faster
IT IS PROBABLY too early for Gov. Maura Healey to be thinking about her legacy, but we have a suggestion for how she could make her mark on Massachusetts. The governor could employ a new approach to make the state’s workforce training system more accessible, more utilized, and better able to re-employ people quickly. Not […]
Posted inEconomy
A race to keep up – or to the bottom?
MARCH WAS “Problem Gambling Awareness Month” in Massachusetts, but for those in charge of the state lottery the gambling problem coming into the new year was that people weren’t doing enough of it. The lottery was seeing flat or declining sales in many of its games during the last half of 2022, which represented the […]
Posted inEconomy
Mass. economic growth slows, projected to go negative
STATE HOUSE NEWS SERVICE MASSACHUSETTS SQUEAKED OUT a smidgen of economic growth in the first quarter of 2023, slowing substantially from its late 2022 growth rate, and analysts are predicting GDP declines in the second and third quarters. Gross domestic product here rose at a 0.1 percent annualized rate in the first quarter, after rising […]
Posted inOpinion
Unions are answer to state’s labor shortage
MASSACHUSETTS HAS a crisis on its hands. The Commonwealth faces an alarming labor shortage, with fewer people participating in the workforce and more of the Commonwealth’s residents choosing to move elsewhere. The cost of living is skyrocketing causing many to face hard economic decisions. We cannot afford to ignore this problem, but it’s also a […]
Posted inOpinion
Industrial land disappearing at an alarming pace
A STRONG INDUSTRIAL sector can help maintain the middle class, provide stable wages in a tumultuous economy, and seed technological innovations that attract workers and businesses to our region – yet Greater Boston is losing manufacturing jobs and industrial land at an alarming pace. What can planners and policy makers do to stem this trend […]
Posted inOpinion
Here’s how we define competitiveness
IN RECENT WEEKS, leading business groups in Massachusetts have urged newly-elected Gov. Maura Healey to focus on the state’s economic competitiveness. As current or former leaders of organizations that employ thousands of people in Massachusetts, we agree that making Massachusetts more competitive must be a top priority for state leaders. However, some groups are using […]