The Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia’s state coincident indexes in February were similar to January, generally on the soft side in January. In the one-month changes, West Virginia led with a .62 percent gain, with no other state up as much as .5 percent. Nine states were down, with Washington’s .2 percent drop being the largest. Over the three months ending in February, four states were down, all by small amounts West Virginia and South Carolina were the only states seeing gains above 1 percent. Over the last twelve months, three states were down, and twelve others saw increases of less than one percent. No state had an increase higher than four percent, and only two were higher than three percent. Utah’s index rose 3.32 percent, while Michigan was down 1.64 percent.
The independently estimated national estimates of growth over the last three and twelve months were, respectively, .81 and 2.51 percent. Both measures appear to be somewhat stronger than the state numbers. These indexes are very dependent on payroll employment numbers, and in both January and February the sum of state payroll employment changes was less than the national figure.