At $48 million, the first government mass media campaign to convince cigarette smokers to quit would seem a pricey luxury, especially since that sum purchased just three months of television ads from March through June of 2012. But a new study of its cost effectivenes determined that it cost just $480 for each smoker who quit and $393 per year of life saved.

The graphic videos featured pleas from former smokers who had suffered amputated limbs, oral and throat cancer, paralysis, lung damage, strokes, and heart attacks. One of the most haunting showed Terrie Hall, a 52-year-old North Carolina woman whose larynx was removed after she was diagnosed with throat cancer. In the ad, she spoke with the help of an artificial voice box. Hall later died.

If you’re looking for signs that the U.S. economy is growing and that the job market is improving, just talk to small business owners.

After cutting back on spending for years, people are splurging again. That’s evident at Lady M Cake Boutiques.

An essential tool used to attract businesses to struggling communities will be up for grabs in a statewide sweepstakes starting Dec. 31.

City and county governments across the state can apply to obtain one of the 97 available enterprise zones. The first round of applications are due to the Illinois Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity before the end of the year.

If a company decides to come to a community and build in the enterprise zone, or a business existing within the zone decides to expand, there are several local and state incentives available. The state waives the sales tax on building materials purchased in state. New property in the enterprise zone could be exempt from property taxes determined by the local government. In Galesburg, it’s 10 years tax-free under $1 million per taxing body. Community Development Director Roy Parkin said these enterprise zones are some of the most important factors in obtaining new business.

Vast spending, frustrating software, angry doctors facing a punch in the wallet — and a hungry new Congress. It could add up to a powerful threat to the Obama administration’s $30 billion program to digitize the nation’s medical records.

Many doctors hate the clunky, time-sucking software they got through the massive subsidy program, and most complain that cumbersome information exchange is frustrating their efforts to coordinate and improve patient care. A quarter-million — half of those eligible for the electronic health records program — will face fines in 2015 for failing to use the systems in the way the government required.

State Medicaid officials don’t know how many of their doctors are using electronic records, although they have handed out $9 billion of those federal funds to encourage their adoption. Nor do they have much sense of how much the technology is helping low-income patients.

I wish I knew where the economy will be heading next year. If I did, I might become rich. But, alas, I don’t — and even if we don’t always acknowledge it, no economists do.

Too much uncertainty clouds the crystal ball to be confident that any particular course of events will play out in the real world. But we do know something about the sources of that uncertainty, and in a season for sharing, I’d like to offer six questions whose eventual resolution will shape the economic year ahead:

The unemployment rate stands at 5.8 percent. If it continues on its current trajectory, it will have fallen an additional half a percentage point by mid-2015, putting it at a level that some economists see as effectively full employment.