Who knows, maybe happy days really are here again.

The recovery from the Great Recession has been filled with more than its share of false dawns, not unlike its big bad granddaddy, the Great Depression. But the Massachusetts economy finally appears poised for some bust-out job growth that could provide a major boost for everyone from developers eyeing mega projects to tower owners looking to fill empty offices, new stats show.

A key Massachusetts business confidence index is moving into positive territory for the first time since the summer of 2012, when the recovery took one of its many nose dives amid the ‘fiscal cliff” melodrama in Congress. With Washington being relatively quiet and the economy on a steady growth path, business confidence is on the move again. The state’s companies are finally warming to the idea of hiring again, according to the Associated Industries of Massachusetts Business Confidence Index.

And more hiring means more demand for office space and greater traction for developers looking to add to Boston’s skyline or roll out the next great corporate campus in the suburbs. Nor can it hurt the residential market either, which recently saw home sales drop off recently after several months of big increases.

“One of the things that have been holding back the office market has been the very slow rate of job creation,” said Andre Mayer, senior vice president of research for AIM. “That has a very direct impact on commercial real estate in that the reason you need offices is to put people in them.”

Certainly jobless rates have been on the decline now for some time in Massachusetts, with a state rate of 6 percent, below the national rate of 6.3 percent, falling below 5 percent along the Route 128 corridor and the western suburbs.

While companies have been hiring, it has been mostly through clenched teeth, with business confidence in the state hovering at a stagnant mid-point between optimism and despair for the past few years.

The AIM index operates on a scale of 100, with anything below 50 indicating a decline in confidence, while conversely, anything above 50 shows increasing confidence. The problem is, after rebounding from the depths of the Great Recession, when the index plunged into the 30s, business confidence has yet to fully recover, stuck around that mediocre midpoint of 50. From a historical perspective, past economic recoveries typically see business confidence rebound sharply, into high 50s and into the 60s, Mayer notes.

So April’s relatively big boost of 2.5 points to 53 may signal that Massachusetts businesses are finally starting to hire for real, with a broadening of the recovery out from the few hot sectors like tech and life sciences, which have been leading the way.

“We do see the index breaking out of the range it had been in,” Mayer said. “What seems to be driving it is a much more favorable response about hiring.”

‘Falling Into Place’

Why the change? For one thing, the brinksmanship in Washington over the budget – which produced various fiscal cliff scares – has taken a breather after peaking last fall with the government shutdown.

Add to that a long spurt of steady, if unspectacular growth, with businesses and consumers as well finally getting to getting comfortable with the idea that the Great Recession is now in the rearview mirror.

“I just talked to a guy who does a lot of commercial leasing for smaller companies and it has been crazy busy,” said Gregory Vasil, CEO of the Greater Boston Real Estate Board. “People are getting used to the fact that things really are getting better and they are less cautious than they were before.”

And when business confidence rises and jobless rates fall, you can bet on it that the office market won’t be far behind. In fact, it’s not just common sense, but a statistical trend that has played out time and again during past recession and recoveries. Jobless rates and office vacancy rates like to stick together, falling in tandem when times are good and rising together as the economy goes south.

“Changes in the unemployment rate and the office vacancy rate are highly correlated,” Bill McBride, a former tech executive who founded the respected economics blog Calculated Risk, wrote back during the recession.

Sure, there can be a bit of a lag – office vacancy rates typically fall after jobless rates go up, given it takes companies time to dump empty space. And in a recovery, companies are initially reluctant to take on new leases until they are bursting at the seams.

So as the upswing in the business cycle finally gains momentum, all that is definitely good news for both tower developers and owners.

While the Back Bay, Cambridge and the Seaport have been hot for some time, the Financial District, the traditional business headquarters for New England, still lags with double-digit vacancy rates. And while the days of half-empty office buildings are over for the suburbs, we are still talking about vacancy rates closer to 20 percent than 10 percent.

And there are a bevy of blockbuster projects whose hopes hinge on strong office market demand, including developer Tom O’Brien’s plans to redevelop the unsightly Government Center garage and Don Chiofaro’s hopes of building big along the Greenway at the site of the Aquarium garage.

It will take a lot of everything to get big projects like these off the ground. But at least the basic building blocks of job growth and rising demand for office space finally appear to be falling into place. 

Scott Van Voorhis can be reached at sbvanvoorhis@hotmail.com.