The Iowa Business Council’s fourth-quarter Economic Outlook Survey shows a lot of optimism among its members.
Executive Director Joe Murphy says anything over 50 on their scale is positive — and this time it was nearly 69. “This is our second-highest score ever, second highest score only to the second quarter of 2018,” Murphy says.
The index is based on expectations for sales, capital spending, and employment for the next six months. Capital spending saw the largest increase. “A leading indicator for us is really capital spending. To see companies investing in their own organizations, investing in infrastructure, hard assets — things like that. To see such a big increase in that over the course of one quarter I think is really good news for Iowa’s economy,” he says. “It shows that our businesses are investing in their companies and their people and really investing to meet that surging demand that we’ve seen for a long time now.”
Murphy says businesses have been very cautious in the last four to six quarters as they have been waiting to see what would happen. “I think this is really showcasing that our recent surging economy is real, and that it gives us a ton of momentum as we move forward,” he says.
The IBC is made up of executives from 22 of the state’s largest businesses. While the business climate is positive — Murphy says there are still some obstacles in the way.
“There are a few things that continue to give us great concern — and the supply chain is definitely one of those,” according to Murphy. “our members have stated that they don’t expect the supply chain to get much better at all over the next six months. So that is obviously a concerning point for us as those choke points and logistics logs remain clogged.”
The other big hurdle continues to be finding workers. “As we look at that situation we know that we’ve got to do things differently, and that’s why we’ve invested in a marketing campaign to try and attract new people into our state. A healthy state is a growing state — just like a healthy company is a growing company,” Murphy says. “And so we really need to be doing everything that we can and that’s why we are challenging all Iowa organizations to think out of the box and really try to bring in new talent outside of our borders.”
He says finding talented issues continue to be the number one concern among members.
