The Wilmington area should ride a rising tide of business optimism and job growth, although hiring and wage growth may increase more slowly than elsewhere in North Carolina and the U.S., said a PNC economist Wednesday morning.

Economist Mekael Teshome spoke at a breakfast presented by PNC and Wilmington Business Development. The event, held at Cape Fear Community College’s Union Station building, attracted area business leaders and local government officials to hear Teshome summarize the results of PNC’s spring survey of small and midsize business owners.

Teshome said, based on the survey data, that the Wilmington area should expect a job growth rate of 2.2 or 2.3 percent in 2014. While that’s positive, he said, the area experienced deeper unemployment during the recession, so it has “a deeper hole to climb out of” than many other areas across the country.

“We’re expecting the U.S. to completely climb out of the hole in the next few months, back to our pre-recession peak, but in Wilmington, we’ll get back to pre-recession levels about a year later: in mid-2015,” Teshome predicted.

He said that the Wilmington area possesses several key advantages for business: a cost of doing business that is about 20 percent lower than the national average, steady population growth and a relatively skilled workforce, with 31 percent of area residents holding at least a bachelor’s degree – two percentage points higher than the national average.

“That combination of factors will help boost the region’s growth,” he said, but cautioning, “A lot of job growth generated will be in the leisure and retail industries, which generally are low-wage industries. As a result, income growth will not be as robust as job growth.”

Per capita income in the Cape Fear region, Teshome said, is about 5 percent lower than for North Carolina as a whole, and 18 percent lower than the U.S. average.

“We have to generate higher-wage industries if we want to close that gap: industries such as high-tech specialty manufacturing and anything related to the port. Maritime generates a lot of money. Trade, investment in the ports and maritime-related production is an area of opportunity for this region,” Teshome said.

Speaking about the survey results for North Carolina in general, Teshome said that owners of small and mid-sized businesses feel more confident about their economic prospects in the near future.

North Carolina business owners – as well as their counterparts across the Southeast – are responding positively to several improving factors affecting the economy, according to Teshome. He said those factors are a healthier housing market; lowered rates of household debt and increased rates of household saving; robust business profits and leaner, more productive business operations; and a financial system that is more sound, with banks raising more capital and improving the quality of their loans.

As those factors continue to evolve and improve, two additional supporting factors will boost 2014 GDP to an anticipated 2.8 percent in the region: almost one percentage point over the 1.9 real GDP recorded in 2013, Teshome said.

“There is less fiscal drag. Spending cuts, tax increases and wrangling in Washington removed money and jobs from the economy,” he said. “Also, we have an improving global economy: Europe is coming out of recession, Japan’s economy is reviving and a number of emerging markets are expected to pick up. This will boost exports and improve our trade balance.

“Weights on the economy are being lifted, moving us back to a more normal potential rate of economic growth,” Teshome concluded.

PNC’s survey was conducted Jan. 31 through March 7 of this year with owners of businesses ranging from $100,000 to $2.5 million in annual revenues. In North Carolina, 151 such business owners were surveyed by telephone.