State Labor Markets in October 2022
|in:Viewpoints
State labor market results in October were softer than in the last couple of years, though not very weak. Seven states had statistically significant increases in payrolls, with Colorado’s .8 percent gain the largest in those terms. California picked up more than 50,000 jobs, and Texas slightly short of that. Over the last 12 months, every state (and DC) saw a gain in payrolls, thought the increases in Alaska, DC, Mississippi, and Wyoming were not deemed to be statistically significant. Florida and Texas were the only states to see gains of at least 5.0 percent (California’s absolute increase was a hair larger than Texas’s.
A full 24 states experienced statistically significant increases in their unemployment rates from September to October (Pennsylvania’s fell .1 percentage point to 4.0 percent), but in the vast majority of cases these were, in absolute terms, fairly modest. Only Maryland’s .5 percentage point rise (from 4.0 to 4.5 percent) would normally be considered large. Unemployment rates remain fairly low across the nation DC’s rate is the highest tin the nation, at 4.8 percent, while Illinois and Nevada are both at 4.6 percent. Seven states have rates of 2.4 percent or lower.
Puerto Rico’s job count was little-changed, and for a second straight month there was insufficient information to compute the unemployment rate on the island.
Charles Steindel
AuthorMore in Author Profile »Charles Steindel has been editor of Business Economics, the journal of the National Association for Business Economics, since 2016. From 2014 to 2021 he was Resident Scholar at the Anisfield School of Business, Ramapo College of New Jersey. From 2010 to 2014 he was the first Chief Economist of the New Jersey Department of the Treasury, with responsibilities for economic and revenue projections and analysis of state economic policy. He came to the Treasury after a long career at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, where he played a major role in forecasting and policy advice and rose to the rank of Senior Vice-President. He has served in leadership positions in a number of professional organizations. In 2011 he received the William F. Butler Award from the New York Association for Business Economics, is a fellow of NABE and of the Money Marketeers of New York University, and has received several awards for articles published in Business Economics. In 2017 he delivered Ramapo College's Sebastian J. Raciti Memorial Lecture. He is a member of the panel for the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia's Survey of Professional Forecasters and of the Committee on Research in Income and Wealth. He has published papers in a range of areas, and is the author of Economic Indicators for Professionals: Putting the Statistics into Perspective. He received his bachelor's degree from Emory University, his Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and is a National Association for Business Economics Certified Business EconomistTM.
Global