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Hao Says Eco-Dev Insurance policies Purpose To Assist State Journey Sector “Tailwinds”
DEC. 6, 2023…..The broad purpose of the financial growth plan the Healey administration put ahead this week is to construct upon the state’s sturdy factors to maintain Massachusetts a perfect place to stay, elevate a household and develop a enterprise nicely into the long run.
However one other aspiration was revealed Wednesday when Financial Improvement Secretary Yvonne Hao detailed the plan for lawmakers — for Massachusetts to hitch the small membership of states which have a gross home product of $1 trillion or extra.
The plan’s imaginative and prescient matches up conventional financial growth matters like expertise attraction and retention, boosting housing manufacturing, making public transportation extra dependable, and streamlining entry to state assets with Healey’s particular emphasis on values like inclusion in addition to state insurance policies round reproductive and civil rights. It goals to “lengthen our lead” in sectors like life sciences, well being care, and superior manufacturing, whereas additionally seizing alternatives to change into new leaders in local weather tech and tourism.
“That is the best way we change into greater than a trillion,” Hao stated in response to a query from Sen. Barry Finegold, co-chair of the Joint Committee on Financial Improvement and Rising Applied sciences. She added, “Nearly all of our economic system is aligned round industries which can be rising — well being care is rising, life sciences is rising, local weather tech is rising, superior manufacturing is rising, AI is growing, robotics are growing. So we have a ton of tailwinds in growth sectors and so we just need to make sure that we continue to lengthen our lead and continue to invest and continue to implement all of these initiatives here. Those sectors are growing already. If we can just continue to — not even just hold our share, but even increase our share, we’re going to become a trillion dollar GDP.”
GDP measures the market value of the goods and services produced in a state. Massachusetts had a GDP of $691.46 billion in 2022, according to the U.S. Dept. of Commerce’s Bureau of Economic Analysis. Only five states had a GDP equal to or greater than $1 trillion last year: California, Texas, New York, Florida and Illinois.
The discussion of a $1 trillion GDP as a goal for Massachusetts spurred Sen. Liz Miranda to highlight that using GDP as a measurement has “fostered a fixation on growing the pie that sometimes ignores” that economic growth is not spread evenly across the state but often concentrated in a select few areas.
Massachusetts is the most educated and wealthiest state in the country, the administration’s economic development plan says, but it is also the third-most unequal of the states, based on 2022’s Gini coefficient, a common measure of inequality that economists rely upon.
Miranda said she was “really feeling like we can’t totally evaluate the effectiveness of our economic development policies without a consistent, high-quality measure of how economic growth is distributed in the commonwealth, particularly across geographic and non-geographic communities who have historically been in lowest percentiles and living in the margins.”
“I know it’s incredibly important, we want to grow to a trillion. But how do we actually measure that so we actually know the truth about how it’s being distributed across the commonwealth?” Miranda asked Hao.
The secretary said she sees there being two ways to achieve equality: “We can be more equal but have everything stay the same. Or the real way to get equity, I think, is to continue to grow and have everyone lift up and to close the gap.”
“And so I think we need to measure multiple metrics. So looking at GDP overall is important, looking at GDP growth is important. But looking at the gap, and closing the gap, is really important. And so the Gini coefficient is a number that I pay a lot of attention to. I’m a former economist, and it is the universal way to look at income inequality. In our state, we want to look at Gini coefficient by different areas — by race, but also by region. Our gap in race is quite dramatic. So if you look at kind of average income by race, it’s a $20,000-$30,000 difference. It’s also equally dramatic by region. Western Mass. versus Eastern Mass., even amongst people of the same race, is $20,000 or $30,000. And so we have a lot of work to do on thinking about income inequality.”
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