Muncie forecast 2023.

• Author: Faulk, Dagney

During 2022, the Muncie metro continued to recover from the business closures and shutdowns that occurred during the height of the pandemic. The pandemic interrupted the small gains in employment and income that had been made over the previous years as the Muncie metro recovered from the Great Recession and various structural changes to the local economy related to dramatic decreases in manufacturing employment over the past several decades. Positive gains in employment and income were evident during 2022, but the level of employment is still lower than pre-pandemic levels.

Highlights from 2022's business news included new businesses moving to sites around Muncie. Living Green Farm, specializing in aeroponic farming, opened a facility in a shell building that had been vacant since 2014. (1) Filtrec, an Italian filter maker, opened a production facility and moved its North American headquarters to Delaware County. (2) A Gillman Home Center store (hardware and building materials) opened during September on the southside of Muncie. The CanPack Group, a manufacturer of aluminum beverage cans, continued construction of an 862,000 square-foot facility in the southside industrial park. (3) BrickRed Systems, an IT consulting firm based in Redmond, Washington, purchased the former, mostly vacant Southway Plaza shopping center and plans to operate a facility there. (4)

This article uses the most recent data available (at the time of this writing) from public sources on various measures of economic activity for the Muncie MSA (Delaware County) to analyze changes over the past year. A summary of the labor market forecast for the Muncie area is included in the conclusion.

Labor markets

The Muncie metro area experienced low unemployment rates over the last year with several months coming in below 3%. The labor force, which consists of employed persons along with persons actively looking for work, is finally approaching pre-pandemic levels and grew from 51,714 to 53,241 during this period (September 2021 to September 2022). Before the pandemic, Muncie's labor force topped 54,000 in 2019. With an increased labor force post pandemic and the high number of current job openings, we expect the unemployment rate to remain low, between 3% and 4% during the coming year, even as the macroeconomy adjusts to higher interest rates and the likelihood of recession.

Employment by industry was measured using January-to-August averages for each year. No single industry saw a decline in employment from 2021 to 2022 (see Table 2). The number of jobs increased by a total of 1,288 jobs, or 2.7%, over this period. The four industries that saw the greatest percentage gains in employment were leisure and hospitality (6.9%); trade, transportation and utilities...