By Audrey Jensen | Phoenix Business Journal
An economic forecast for the state and Phoenix metro show Arizona will continue to add a significant number of residents, housing and jobs while dealing with inflation, supply chain issues and a low supply of homes in the growing region.
Although Arizona is one of the top states in the nation for population growth, Lee McPheters, a research professor of economics and director of the JPMorgan Chase Economic Outlook Center at Arizona State University, said the state increased by a total of 98,000 residents last year, which was lower than the anticipated 107,000 new residents.
“Unfortunately there’s somewhat of a somber story behind that,” McPheters said on May 4 during the Economic Club of Phoenix’s economic panel featuring several experts with the W.P. Carey School of Business at ASU. “We completely misestimated the extent of pandemic-related deaths in Arizona. We had a very high death rate, and essentially deaths cancelled the births.”
Most of the increase in residents came from net migration, but McPheters said Arizona did not get the 20,000 to 25,000 the region usually gets from natural increases. In two years, 30,189 people have died from Covid-19 in Arizona, which has the second-highest per capita death rate in the country, with 411 deaths per 100,000 people, second only to Mississippi.
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