The Indiana University East Business and Economic Research Center (the BERC) of the School of Business and Economics surveyed regional businesses to research the business and economic pulse in East-Central Indiana.

The 2020 East-Central Indiana Business Survey was completed by businesses in September-October 2020 amid of the outbreak of the COVID-19 global pandemic.

This is the fifth year of the survey. The survey is conducted annually as usual in the fall of the reporting year, the findings and outlook derived from the responses of the business operators included in this report do not reflect all the impact of the pandemic on the seven-county region. Since the data was collected, many businesses’ plans have been disrupted or changed due to the pandemic. The hope is that this report will still provide a baseline measurement of what area businesses had anticipated versus the actual challenging situation they are currently facing.

In this survey, seven East-Central Indiana counties were included to provide an overview of the business climate of the regional economy.

The survey was sent to more than 750 local business operators in Fayette, Franklin, Henry, Randolph, Rush, Union, and Wayne counties across a wide spectrum of industries including professional services, manufacturing, health care, information technology, retail trade, and banking and financial services. There were 101 participating businesses who completed the survey. Half of the surveyed businesses have operated in their counties for more than 20 years.

The survey was broken down into sections including demographics, performance, expectations, concerns and forecasts for the coming year. A few of the survey highlights indicated that businesses in the region had experienced a much more difficult time in 2020 than the year before and still expected a difficult time in 2021— although not as bad as 2020.  While a quarter of the survey participants anticipated that the business and economic conditions in 2021 would remain about the same as in 2020, more than half of them were optimistic and less than one-fifth were pessimistic about the conditions

The survey report is available on the BERC website at iue.edu/business/berc/.

This project would not have been successful without the support and contribution of the Fayette County Chamber of Commerce, the Economic Development Group of Connersville and Fayette County, the Franklin County Chamber of Commerce, Experience Franklin County, Indiana, Inc., the Franklin County Convention, Recreation and Visitors Commission, and Franklin County Welcome Center, the New Castle-Henry County Chamber of Commerce, the New Castle-Henry County Economic Development Corporation, the Randolph County Community & Economic Development Corporation, the Rush County Chamber of Commerce, the Union County Development Corporation, the Wayne County Area Chamber of Commerce and the Economic Development Corporation of Wayne County .

For more information, contact the Director of the Business and Economic Research Center and Associate Professor of Finance Oi Lin (Irene) Cheung, Ph.D., at (765) 973-8497.