Economic Development

• Louisiana reported 1,179 new COVID-19 cases and fewer hospitalizations today as the trajectory...

The state treasury department will send out the first round of checks Wednesday for...

The Baton Rouge Area Chamber today released its latest COVID-19 economic indicator dashboard that...

This week marks five months since the World Health Organization designated COVID-19 as a...

Baton Rouge-based Walk-On’s Bistreaux & Bar is bucking state and national trends, opening new restaurants across the Southeast at a pace that is surprisingly rapid. 

Top decision makers in the Southeastern Conference are reportedly holding an impromptu meeting this...

Despite the economic hardships created by the pandemic, bankruptcy filings so far this year,...

• The U.S. added 1.8 million jobs in July, a pullback from the gains...

While the coronavirus pandemic has done damage to many sectors of the economy, it hasn’t had a negative effect on residential real estate, at least not yet. On the contrary, home sale activity in East Baton Rouge Parish through July is slightly higher than it was for the same period in 2019 or 2018, according to an analysis of MLS data compiled by the Greater Baton Rouge Association of Realtors and provided by local real estate agents.

In a meeting this morning of the Louisiana Economic Recovery Task Force, Dr. Stephen Barnes, an economist at UL-Lafayette and a member of the state’s Revenue Estimating Conference, said data suggests the economic downturn will last longer and be harder to recover from than originally thought. “While we had initially hoped this would be a much shorter event, as time passes more and more permanent damage is being done,” Barnes said. “That is going to give you a recovery path that might look more and more like the Great Recession did than the recovery after an event like Katrina.”