In 2025, Louisiana's economy notched some impressive wins, with economic development officials of industrial megaprojects throughout the year that promise to bring billions of dollars in investments and thousands of new jobs to the state.
Experts who study the economy and work with local businesses and organizations across the state, however, say the optimism has been tempered by the difficult realities on the ground that have come with uncertainty around tariffs, supply chain disruptions, workforce shortages and inflation.
Now, at the start of 2026, we wondered what lessons could be learned by looking back. For our latest edition ofOne Big Question, we asked four experts from different corners of the state to weigh in: What was the single biggest challenge for business in 2025?
The following answers have been edited for brevity.
Richard Nelson, president of the Louisiana Community and Technical College System, former secretary of revenue
Finding a skilled workforce. I think we've somewhat remedied the problem of how to bring investment to our state. At least on the surface, we've had these huge investment announcements throughout this entire year. Now, we're in the position of having to find the people to staff this. And that has happened across the state.
Everything I go to, they're telling me they need 'this many hundred electricians' or 'this many hundred welders.' All these projects are incredibly capital intensive. They're going to be incredibly demanding, especially in these skilled trades, construction trades, and we just don't have the skilled workforce right now to do that.
That impacts things besides just these mega-projects, because if Meta hires every electrician in Louisiana to go up to Richland Parish, then where does that leave the rest of us? When you have this huge imbalance between supply and demand it can trickle down to somebody just trying to get the plumbing done in their house. If all the plumbers are in Richland Parish, they can't get it done. So I think that's an emerging problem this year, and I think next year it'll be even worse.
Jaci Russo,CEO, co-founder and strategist, brandRUSSO, a Lafayette-based branding agency
The biggest challenge is uncertainty. This crosses political parties, geographies, socioeconomic lines. Uncertainty has people concerned, which makes them pull back. When they pull back, they're not investing, they're not spending, they're not hiring and that's kind of what makes the world go around from an economic standpoint. We see companies saving for a rainy day. They are uncertain because of tariffs, interest rates, the stock market, AI. Pick your industry, pick your uncertainty.
The companies that seem to be getting through that are the ones that are taking stock of where they are, reminding themselves of what's positive. They're looking in the rear view to see the forward progress they've made and they are investing in their future, not necessarily wasting money or even spending money, but shoring up their resources, leaning into cross-training, identifying opportunities for growth into new markets or new sectors. They are planning, some of them for the first time ever. And they're starting to see that they can be confident again and aggressively grow again.
Patrick Scott, economics professor, director of the Center for Economic Research, Louisiana Tech University
Tariffs are the biggest challenge to businesses, especially small businesses. They usually only do short- to medium-term planning. They don't have the ability to rearrange their supply chain. They don't have a lot of the large-scale demand for inputs that allows them to have some degree of market power, or to be able to hedge away some of this tariff uncertainty.
In Louisiana, about 56% of our labor force is made up of businesses that hire 10 workers or less. When we have a large-scale recession, yes, it’s going to be the company that lays off 2,000 workers that's going to be the story, because that's the easiest story to report. We're not going to report the 2,000 businesses that laid off four workers on average. But that's the tidal wave. That's where we hurt the most.
Import prices are up. We're not surprised by that. But export prices are, oddly enough, slightly down. From a retaliatory perspective, our trading partners are not retaliating to our tariff policy nearly as forcefully as what we're imposing, and they’re buying less. That tells me that we're actually exporting marginally less, and, most likely, what we're going to see in the coming years is a complete re-scrambling of supply chains internationally to avoid the United States, if these tariffs stay in place.
Jill Roshto, executive director, Louisiana Alliance for Nonprofits
Funding is the biggest challenge. That doesn't really change from year to year. But this year, the added pressure of governmental changes on the federal level, and the loss of federal funding for a variety of nonprofits has added an extra wrinkle. And so we've had a rocky year for nonprofit support, both on the federal and state levels.
The overall trend for the last few years has been the shift in how people give, an aging philanthropic population, and what does that look like for the organizations going forward? In our trainings, one of the first things we tell organizations is “501(c)(3) is just that federal tax status.” You want to operate as if you are a business, but you're a business that gets that tax break only because you provide extremely valuable services in and fill the gaps in our communities that need those gaps filled. But you need to operate as if you are a for-profit business in terms of efficiency, effectiveness, financial responsibility and looking forward.
And I think just like any businesses right now, the change is constant. So nonprofit organizations have to be innovative. Our world's changing so quickly and nonprofit organizations have to change quickly to keep up.
