A Georgia State University economist is predicting that Georgia’s economic growth will be solid in the coming years.
Rajeev Dhawan, director of the Georgia State Economic Forecasting Center, recently told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that Georgia will finish this calendar year with 74,100 more jobs, one-fifth of them being well-paying, “premium” jobs. And in 2015, the state economy will add 83,600 jobs, with about the same proportion of them categorized as “premium.”  
“The Peach State job engine is indeed humming,” he said. “Debt is down, job creation is up and, with consumers accounting for more than two-thirds of the economy, the expansion has entered a more encouraging phase.”
Dhawan predicted that job growth will be concentrated in professional and business services, but manufacturing, education and health care will all expand. He also discounted the past several months of official job reports, telling the AJC that unemployment is the most misleading statistic to measure the health of the economy.
Gov. Nathan Deal this year created the Governor’s High Demand Career Initiative, which brings together the heads of Economic Development, the university and technical college systems and key leaders in private-sector industries to hear directly from the employers about their future employment needs. Another goal of the initiative is to give institutions of education the chance to get ahead of the curve in preparing tomorrow’s workforce.