ROGERS — Northwest Arkansas’ workforce has recovered from the pandemic-driven recession and is even slightly ahead of pre-pandemic numbers, economists said Thursday at the annual Arkansas Business Forecast Dinner.

Experts on the global, US and regional economies shared their views on the recovery from the pandemic and inflation. No one said they saw a recession on the horizon.

The stand-up-only event at the Rogers Convention Center was presented by the Center for Business and Economic Research, part of the Walton College of Business at the University of Arkansas.

Julia Coronado, founder of economic research firm MacroPolicy Perspectives, said the pandemic has been a test of the resilience of economies around the world. The U.S. has had the strongest recovery in the world, thanks in part to a particularly resilient labor market, she said.

“During the pandemic, different countries experienced varying levels of unemployment, but developed economies recovered quickly and labor markets proved resilient during the downturn in 2022,” Coronado said.

The supply chain is still trying to get back to normal, Coronado said, but “better functioning of the supply side and easing the flow of goods is easing pressure in the pipelines.”

Coronado said some clouds on the horizon around the world include a slowdown in China’s economy after two decades of spurring global growth. On the other hand, India is becoming a growing market with a young population eager to embrace new technologies.

In addition, she said that the war between Ukraine and Russia could cause serious damage to the economy of Europe.

Overall, Coronado said the global economy is facing headwinds this year due to fiscal and monetary tightening, war and global fragmentation.

“Global turmoil remains high,” she said, “and we are unlikely to return to an era of low volatility.”

But the global economy will also benefit from lower inflation, a “supply-side recovery” and job market resilience, Coronado said.

“Improving supply-side performance and renewed consumer price sensitivity is driving inflation down,” she said.

John List, chief economist at Walmart and professor of economics at the University of Chicago, also dismisses the idea that the United States is heading for a recession.

List studied the trends of the last 10 recessions in the country and said that the current economic situation of the country has nothing to do with those periods.

While the unemployment rate usually rises during a recession, the US unemployment rate has fallen from 4% to 3.5% since the beginning of 2022.

Underemployment, where more people who want to work full-time end up taking part-time jobs, also increases during a recession. But List said underemployment in 2022 was the lowest in 20 years.

The only downside, he says, is that the number of people in the workforce tends to decline during recessions. And after a consistent rise in 2021, the labor force participation rate remained largely unchanged through 2022.

The bottom line, List said, is that “while labor force participation rates may give some pause, wage growth, underemployment and hiring data all paint a much brighter picture.”

“Going forward, who knows,” he said. Much depends on the Federal Reserve, which raised interest rates sharply in 2022 to curb inflation.

Finally, Mervyn Jebaraj, director of the Center for Business and Economic Research, showed in a series of charts how Arkansas, and the Northwest region in particular, has handled the pandemic.

The unemployment rate in Arkansas during the first months of the recession was half that of the US, Jebaraj said. And Northwest Arkansas is the only one of the state’s six metropolitan areas where the workforce is not only recovering from the losses of the past two years, but actually exceeding them by the end of 2022.

In addition to Northwest Arkansas, Census Bureau-designated urban areas are Central Arkansas, Fort Smith, Jonesboro, Pine Bluff, and Hot Springs.

Jebaraj said there has been a price correction in the housing market across the country. But that didn’t happen in Northwest Arkansas, where he doesn’t foresee a sharp decline in house prices.

Although they have eased slightly since peaking in June, house prices have remained high since then, he said, and he expects them to remain high. The reason Northwest Arkansas is bucking the national trend is because of the large numbers of people who continue to flock to the region.

Jebaraj said investors are no longer the biggest buyers of real estate in Northwest Arkansas. Instead, the customers now are people moving to the region.

Not enough houses and apartments have been built over the past few years to handle this influx, he said. A tight housing market will keep house prices high, he said.

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