A report released Wednesday by the Minnesota Chamber of Commerce warns that the state’s economy is “losing ground” compared to the rest of the nation.

The Chamber of Commerce announced that it has launched a multi-year initiative, dubbed the “Economic Imperative for Growth,” to reverse the findings of the report.

According to the report, Minnesota’s GDP per capita has grown 1.0% annually since 2019, while the national average is 1.8%.

The state’s labor force only increased 0.2% annually, leaving nearly two jobs per job seeker, the report found. Minnesota’s labor force growth ranked 40th nationally.

Additionally, the report found that from 2020 to 2024, nearly 48,000 more people left Minnesota than moved here, ranking the state 41st nationally.

“These stats should serve as a wake-up call,” said Doug Loon, president and CEO of the Minnesota Chamber of Commerce. “We cannot hide from the realities of our economic position. We can both celebrate what’s great and confront the barriers that hold us back. It’s time to restore our competitiveness and create opportunity here in Minnesota.”

When asked what’s led up to the decline, Loon said, “Comes back to a few fundamental realities of our economy and our state. We have a demographic challenge. We’re an aging population. We’re not replacing ourselves as fast as we want to order, and we’re not seeing the migration to Minnesota that we once enjoyed. So you put those things together, we have this challenges with our population,” he said.

And that’s not all.

“Our regulatory and tax environment, are burdens on business expansion and investment,” Loon added.

As for solutions, Loon stated, “We need to make sure we’re an affordable state, that we’re welcome to people moving here and helping them find a career and opportunity here in the state. This is all about economic opportunity for Minnesotans and non-Minnesotans to be in Minnesota,” he said. These are challenges for us we need to think about. That also relates to our tax code. Are we going to always be a high tax state? Taxes are almost every aspect of our economy? That is a challenge that many times, pushes investments and people away from Minnesota. So then, there are also our regulatory environment. We’ve been working hard at the chamber to come up with a better way, more efficiently, to deliver regulations to the state, as opposed to creating barriers to regulations.”

You can view the full report below:

For Related Stories: Economy  Money Matters