Oregon Office of Economic Analysis

This morning I have the privilege of being a part of Portland State’s Northwest Economic Research Center‘s forecast breakfast. NERC, of course, is headed by Tom Potiowsky who used to oversee our office as the state economist for much of the 2000s. In recent years, Tom and his team have created regional economic forecasts in addition to other research and consulting work.

My part of the forecast event is a presentation that focuses on some of the bigger picture issues and risks, or headwinds and tailwinds in the economy. I tried to stay away from some of the short-term supply side constraints we’ve talked about quite a bit in the past year. Instead, I focus on larger, structural issues in the economy that we don’t always get the time to highlight and discuss. Some of these issues are Oregon-specific, even regional-specific, while others are national in scope.  After pulling together the presentation, I did realize that much of this is tucked away or buried deep in our official forecast document. That’s both good news (yay, we included these topics) and bad news (boo, we kind of give them short shrift). So, in the coming weeks I’m going to unpack a few of these topics a bit more.

While we may not cover most of these issues on a regular basis, we have touched on all of them at least once before. For those interested in more, see these links.

• Industrial structure and growth [Slide 2]
• Oregon high-tech [Slide 3]
• Software, outposts and critical mass [Slide 4]
• Start-ups and new business formation [Slide 5]
• Population: natural increase [Slide 6]
• Population: migration [Slide 7]
• Housing [Slide 8]
• Job Polarization [Slide 9]
• Geographic disparities [Slide 10]
• Economic mobility [Slide 11]
• Public finances/tax structure [Slide 12]

Stay tuned for the updates, although most will be after our upcoming economic and revenue forecast release which is next Wednesday, May 23rd.