The National Electrical Manufacturers Association (NEMA), Rosslyn, Va., recently announced that its nationally ranked forecasters Don Leavens, vice president and chief economist, and Tim Gill, director economics, placed highly in the Wall Street Journal’s Economic Forecasting Survey for the second year in a row.
Leavens and Gill were ranked number one for their 2011 macroeconomic forecast and finished in fifth place for 2012, according to annual results released by the newspaper. The achievement marks a notable degree of consistency during an extended period of difficult-to-predict economic conditions. Approximately 50 forecasters serve on the Wall Street Journal panel each year, representing academia, financial institutions, consulting firms, private businesses and industry associations. Their contributions are evaluated using a methodology designed by the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta.
“We’ve long held that the recovery from the Great Recession was going to be slower than in past business cycles,” said Leavens. “That view has been borne out by the data over the last couple of years.”
How do NEMA’s forecasters expect the economy to perform in 2013? “We see economic growth in the first half of 2013 looking much like it has over the last several years,” said Gill in a press release announcing the honor. “But a steadily recovering housing market and more robust consumer spending gains should contribute to a stronger economy later in the year and into 2014.”
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Jim Lucy Blog
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Jim Lucy has been wandering through the electrical market for more than 30 years, most of the time as an editor for Electrical Wholesaling, Electrical Marketing newsletter and CEE News. During that time he and the editorial team for the publications have won numerous national awards for their coverage of the electrical business. He showed an early interest in electricity, when as a youth he had an idea for a hot dog cooker. Unfortunately, the first crude prototype malfunctioned and the arc nearly blew him out of his parents' basement. Before becoming an editor for Electrical Wholesaling magazine and Electrical Marketing, he earned a BA degree in journalism and a MA in communications from Glassboro State College, Glassboro, NJ., which is formerly best known as the site of the 1967 summit meeting between President Lyndon Johnson and Russian Premier Aleksei Nikolayevich Kosygin, and now best known as the New Jersey state college that changed its name in 1992 to Rowan University because of a generous $100 million donation by N.J. zillionaire industrialist Henry Rowan. Jim is a Brooklyn-born Jersey Guy happily transplanted in the fertile plains of Kansas for the past 20 years.