Whoever becomes New Jersey’s governor next year will oversee a state business climate fraught with high taxes, rising unemployment, lagging gross domestic product and the fallout from President Donald Trump’s tariffs, which have triggered a sluggish job market and the prospect of a recession — not to mention the fears of an artificial intelligence bubble burst.
Some of those issues — like Trump’s tariffs and the rise of AI displacing portions of the labor market — “certainly pose challenges that would be hard to combat via state policy alone,” said Will Irving, a professor at the New Jersey State Policy Lab at Rutgers University…
Lagging economic growth for NJ
New Jersey’s GDP in the second quarter of this year was 2.8%, according to federal numbers, compared with Texas, whose GDP was 6.8%, and a national GDP of 3.8%.
Connecticut’s GDP was 4.6%, New York’s was 4.0%, Pennsylvania’s was 4.1% and Delaware’s was 3.2%.
That lag in New Jersey’s GDP can be attributed to the loss of manufacturing for decades in the state, said Irving, of Rutgers.
New Jersey Herald, October 20, 2025