Business leaders in Pennsylvania don’t see inflation subsiding in the near future, according to a survey released this week by the Harrisburg-based Lincoln Institute for Public Opinion & Research.
A total of 212 businesses from across the Keystone State responded to the institute’s poll, with just over half of the respondents being business owners; 20 percent serving as either chief executive officer, head of finance or head of operations; and about a fifth serving as either state or local manager.
What they told the pollsters bodes ill for Pennsylvania consumers and offers only modest reassurance when it comes to wage growth. Forty-two percent of corporate officials reported that they plan to hike prices over the next few months, with one-fourth anticipating they will implement some combination of pay or benefit raises. Nineteen percent said they believe they will adjust operating hours.
Business leaders’ reflections on the overall state of business in the commonwealth are also sobering, with only one-fifth of respondents voicing a view that conditions have become more positive over the last six months. Over one-third say economic conditions have worsened and 42 percent said they have stayed “about the same.”
Even that last figure isn’t so reassuring, according to the institute.
“‘About the same’ is not good as the survey has found a generally negative view of the state’s business climate since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in the Spring of 2020,” Lincoln Institute Chairman Lowman Henry explained in a report on the poll.
And the corporate leaders had hardly any rosier an outlook on the months to come, with 40 percent saying they believed current conditions will persist largely unchanged, 35 percent believing circumstances will get worse and 23 percent thinking the climate will recover at least somewhat.
Pollsters inquired of the business professionals as to the most challenging issue their entities face, and 45 percent of them answered it is inflation – which hit a forty-year high on the national level this summer. Nearly a third of respondents said they are finding it difficult to acquire proficient employees and almost as many reported they struggle to keep such workers.
In addition, 28 percent of businesses said state taxes have made it difficult to do business and 23 percent consider federal taxes a major concern.
When asked what they believe has been the most consequential factor in intensifying inflation, 27 percent of the executives cited exorbitant government spending, 20 percent primarily blamed lingering impacts wrought by COVID-19 and the measures government implemented to contain the pandemic, 14 percent pointed to Russia’s war on Ukraine, 13 percent blamed corporate greed, 10 percent faulted restrictions on energy production, and 8 percent blamed previously loose monetary policy.
The Lincoln Institute also asked respondents about their view of recent state policy changes. The business leaders mostly registered approval of the agreement that Democrat Governor Tom Wolf and Republican legislators made to halve the state’s corporate net income tax to 4.99 percent over the next decade. Nearly half of respondents said they favor the pace of the reduction, with 27 percent calling it too slow and 15 percent thinking it is too swift.
Most executives, however, said they disapproved of Wolf’s decision to enter Pennsylvania in the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, effectively a carbon-taxation pact. Fifty-one percent of respondents said the commonwealth should withdraw from the multi-state agreement if the courts allow the state’s general assembly to make that decision, while 30 percent said Pennsylvania should stay in it.
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Bradley Vasoli is a writer for The Pennsylvania Daily Star. Follow Brad on Twitter at @BVasoli. Email tips to [email protected].
Photo “Woman Grocery Shopping with Her Child” by Greta Hoffman.
