A new survey among small and mid-sized business owners offered a mixed bag on how they view the economic recovery.<\/p>\n
The survey, which was conducted by Sage North America, found that about one-third of the business owners saw the economy strengthening during the next six months while about half said it would remain the same. About 16% of respondents saw the economy as actually getting worse.<\/p>\n
These numbers are an improvement on a 2012 survey, which saw only 27% or respondents anticipating recovery versus 57% seeing no change. In that survey, 16% also saw the economy weakening.<\/p>\n
Joe Langer, Sage’s executive vice president for mid-market solutions, said although the results were mixed, some recent economic indicators — such as the December 2013 jobs report — were heartening.<\/p>\n
“Manufacturers are heading into 2014 with increased confidence in the economy and an optimistic outlook for growth in both production and hiring,” Langer told Supply Chain Management Review<\/a>. “To that end, companies should continue to look at technology to augment and support their expansion.”<\/p>\n One of the biggest upsides of economic growth will be new job creation, according to Langer. Yet some companies are already having difficultly filling the “huge” talent gap in manufacturing.<\/p>\n “Unfortunately, the jobs with the most impact on performance for many manufacturing companies are the jobs that are largely going unfilled,” he said. “If this problem is not solved, this talent gap will have a negative impact on the future growth of the American manufacturing industry, which is an industry that is pivotal to the economic stability of this country.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A new survey among small and mid-sized business owners offered a mixed bag on how they view the economic recovery. The survey, which was conducted by Sage North America, found that about one-third of the business owners saw the economy strengthening during the next six months while about half said it would remain the same. … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":16,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,293],"tags":[1079],"class_list":["post-6261","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-material-handling","category-news","tag-material-handling"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bahrns.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6261","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bahrns.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bahrns.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bahrns.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/16"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bahrns.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6261"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.bahrns.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6261\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12660,"href":"https:\/\/www.bahrns.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6261\/revisions\/12660"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bahrns.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6261"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bahrns.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6261"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bahrns.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6261"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}