Northwest Indiana is on the path to economic prosperity but hasn’t realized it yet, said Micah Pollak, associate dean of the School of Business and Economics at Indiana University Northwest.
Pollak spoke on a panel with three other economists at the Lake County Advancement Committee and Legacy Foundation’s annual economic outlook luncheon Friday in Hobart.
Ever notice you’ve done something and your neighbor walks by and says, “Wow, you’ve done a really good job,” Pollak asked. “That is kind of the thing you might feel for Northwest Indiana,” he said.
He reminded attendees of when U.S. Sen. Todd Young spoke at the Ignite the Region event and observed, “I think the region’s already united. It’s on fire.”
“Sometimes you need that outside perspective to come in and say you’ve actually done a lot and maybe you just can’t appreciate it because you’re in the midst of it,” Pollak said. That was his theme Friday, he said.
Pollak provided the audience with his Futurecast report with all sorts of numbers on a two-page handout, saying he had to reduce the font size to put in as much data as he could.
At 5.4% in the first quarter, the NWI unemployment rate is well below the 6.6% 20-year average, he said.
The labor force is 2% below the pre-pandemic level, he said, and the most recent month was record-setting. Employment in 2024 is 3%, at pre-pandemic levels.
Of the five largest industries, construction was the only industry in which real annual wages since 2019 declined, by 7.7%. Accommodation and food services saw an 18% jump.
Comparing Northwest Indiana to Cook County, with an economy 12 times the size of Northwest Indiana, the region shined. Northwest Indiana added 509 businesses a year between 2020 and 2024 – as many as all of Cook County – compared to an average of 55 per year between 2002 and 2019. That’s a 14.6% increase since 2019 for the region compared to growth of just 2.3% in Cook County.
Professional, scientific and technical services added 646 businesses in Lake and Porter counties alone, Pollak said. It’s a sector to watch.
“We’ve been fighting with the cloud of manufacturing, where you’re losing a lot of high-paying, good jobs, and we haven’t really found something to replace them,” he said. “We need higher paying jobs that really take up the missing slack, and I think this is a category that can do it. If you look at the business growth, it’s incredible,” Pollak said.
Professional, scientific and technical services – including white-collar jobs like higher education, high school, law, accounting, architecture, engineering design, computer systems management, consulting, advertising and public relations – are desirable jobs for the region.
The management, scientific and tech consulting subset of that sector added 1,719 jobs between 2019 and 2024, a 215% increase. The average annual wage for those positions in 2024 is $62,041.
Northwest Indiana’s population is growing, with net domestic migration growing since 2018, reversing the losses between 2010 and 2017. Plus births exceeded deaths in 2023 for the first time since 2019. Since 2017, the region’s population has grown by 3.4%.
Pollak flagged two issues that require attention in 2025 – housing and early childhood education.
“With these high-paying, good white-collar jobs, we need a variety of housing to meet the needs from the workers,” he said. “That doesn’t mean just more high-end, single-family, detached homes. You need apartments and condos. You need everything.”
“That doesn’t necessarily mean cheap, but it means you need more variety for wherever they’re at in their current career,” he said. “We can keep them here without having to move away.”
Pollak cited a recent report that said the lack of high-quality affordable childhood education costs Indiana’s economy $4.2 billion a year. “That’s huge. If the government could invest $500 million into that, that would be an incredible return on investment,” he said.
“This ties into the labor force, too, because our labor force hasn’t gotten back to the pre-pandemic levels,” Pollak said. “One of the reasons, if you remember during the pandemic and nobody wanted to work anymore, was because they had to stay home and take care of their kids. We haven’t solved that problem. We want more people to return to the labor force; we need to provide some better, more affordable, more accessible, higher-quality early childhood care but also learning and education.”
“There you get a double hit from the labor force because not only do you bring people back to the labor force, but you’re also building new labor. Those early years are so important, so 10, 12, 20 years down the road you have now a number of people who can have jobs,” he said.
Pollak said he thought he was being optimistic about his economic forecast last year, but the numbers came in even better than he expected.
IUN Business Dean of Business and Economics Cynthia Roberts moderated the panel discussion. “I’m feeling better after Micah. What do you guys think?” she asked.
The panel of economists addressed the potential impact of tariffs President-elect Donald Trump has said he would place on imported goods.
Brian Vander Schee, associate professor of marketing at the Kelley School of Business in Bloomington, said he is concerned about what the effect of Trump’s trade policies will be.
“Long before we had the income tax in this country, we had to fund the federal government,” said Carol Rogers, director of the Indiana Business Research Center. President Thomas Jefferson used tariffs to protect nascent manufacturers in the young United States. Back then, she noted, it took a long time to get imported products from overseas.
“Tariffs are a double-edged sword,” she said. Federal revenue from tariffs could be used to pay down the massive national debt. “Consumers, though, get whacked.”
Pre-COVID, tariffs helped the steel industry overall, Pollak said, but manufacturers who used steel to produce goods had to pay higher prices for it.
Tariffs were used heavily in the 1920s, noted audience member Tony Sindone, associate professor of economic development at Indiana University Northwest. “What happened shortly after 1930? Let that gel a little bit.”
Doug Ross is a freelance reporter for the Post-Tribune.
