For years in Michigan, the only certainty seemed to be a vanishing state budget. The auto manufacturing industry, so central to the state’s existence, was believed to be fading, then collapsing. At various times, Michigan officials had to offset more than $10 billion in expected shortfalls — closing prisons, eliminating state departments and cutting funds to libraries, day care programs, crime laboratories, zoos and more. By 2010, Robert L. Emerson, the budget director under Gov. Jennifer M. Granholm, a two-term Democrat who preceded Mr. Snyder, said he found himself working with general fund revenues that had dropped to levels last seen in the early 1990s (or the 1960s, when adjusted for inflation).

While the state had closed the books in the black in some previous years, too, its surpluses on paper were often instantly overtaken by larger projected deficits for the year ahead. Lately, though, signs have shifted. Manufacturing jobs, often declared dead by frustrated workers, have picked up. United States automakers have increased production, saying sales are up, and General Motors, only a few years after a federal rescue and bankruptcy, recaptured in 2011 a crown some thought was merely a dusty memory — that of the world’s largest automaker.

In part, as a result, the unemployment rate in Michigan, which reached 14.1 percent in 2009 and had regularly been among the worst several states in the nation, has lately been among states showing the most significant and continuing rates of improvement, though at 9.3 percent in December it is still above the national average.

By the close of the state’s 2011 budget year, in September, Michigan had collected $8.8 billion in general fund revenues — more than $1 billion less the amount collected in, say, 2000, but noticeably up from the $7.6 billion in Michigan’s coffers in 2010, thanks to growth in state income and sales tax revenues. Officials are now projecting $632 million more in revenues over the next two years than they had been expecting.

“After a decade of declining revenues, it’s pretty doggone good news,” John E. Nixon, Mr. Snyder’s state budget director, said in an interview. “Things have turned.”