Tag Archives: employment rate

Last week’s (July 5, 2019) release by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) of their latest labour market data – Employment Situation Summary – June 2019 – reveals a steady labour market with month-to-month volatility. The US labour market is still adding jobs, albeit at a slower pace than last year. The unemployment rate remains low (at 3.67 per cent) and the participation rate has moved up a tick, which is a good sign. It is also clear that there is still a substantial jobs deficit...

The graph above shows the annual civilian unemployment rate from 1948 to 2018, and here are some highlights: Ten years ago, after the Great Recession, the U.S. unemployment rate peaked at 9.6%. (The only higher unemployment rate in this series was 9.7%, in 1982.) It gradually came down to 3.9% in 2018, the lowest in fifty years. (The rate in 1969 was 3.5%.) But these national unemployment numbers mask the variation that exists across different regions in the U.S. Fortunately, we have...

Last week’s (April 5, 2019) release by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) of their latest labour market data – Employment Situation Summary – March 2019 – is still being affected by the variability in the sampling and benchmarking changes made by the BLS. However, working through those impacts, one concludes that the US labour market is still adding jobs, albeit at a slower pace than last year. The unemployment rate remains low (at 3.81 per cent) and the participation rate has come off...

What does this shift in the Beveridge curve relationship mean? In a literal sense, it means that for a certain unemployment rate (on the horizontal axis), there is a higher rate of job openings (on the vertical axis). To put it another way, employers in the years after 2009 seemed more reluctant to fill their job openings, or as economists say, it appeared to be harder for employers to find a match when they listed a job among the workers who were applying for those jobs. The "matching...

Ramanan analyzes the sleight of hand going on in the neoclassical world now regarding employment and fiscal policy.The Case for Concerted ActionTwin DeceitsV. Ramanan