June 3, 2015

By Jim Nowlan
NP Guest
Columnist

I worry about weak job growth in Illinois, which has been slower in recent decades than in the nation as a whole as well as in the rest of the Midwest.
Our state still has to recover about a quarter million jobs just to get back to where we were in 2000, while the nation has surged far beyond 2000 numbers.
Illinois did add 51,000 jobs in 2014, yet job numbers in Texas jumped last year by a whopping 458,000—and a majority of the Texas jobs are good-paying ones, not the minimum wage kind, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas.
Recently the Illinois Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity asked the consuls general of our 10 largest trading partner nations to provide their perspectives on what our state has going for—and against—us when it comes to economic growth.     Login or Subscribe to read the rest of this story.