For Jobs, a Slower Recover

The number of payroll jobs is barely above what it was in January 2001, about 7 million short of what normal growth would have provided. But, is that worse than other recession or better?

In last recession, under Bush I, the payroll jobs peak was in June 1990. By bringing that forward to the February 2001 peak and scaling it up about 20% we can compare the two recessions. But that would be unfair because the labor market was growing faster back then and that tended to pull up the number of payroll jobs faster at the end of a recession. To compensate I have slowed the growth rate on the old data just enough to match up the rate of job level increase before the two recessions, as can be seen above. The result shows that this recession is lasting longer and it looks like the job recovery will be much slower.

The gap between the two recoveries is now 2.6 million jobs and widening at a rate of well over 100,000 per month.

http://zfacts.com/p/529.html | 01/18/12 07:19 GMT
Modified: Mon, 17 Apr 2006 17:51:21 GMT