Arkansas joblessness rate stays put at 3.6%

Graphs and information about the Arkansas and U.S. joblessness rates.
Graphs and information about the Arkansas and U.S. joblessness rates.

Arkansas' unemployment rate was unchanged at 3.6 percent in December compared with November, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics said Friday.

The national unemployment rate was 3.9 percent in December.

"By and large, this is a more positive jobs report than we've seen for most of last year, where we saw the unemployment rate either hold or decline," said Mervin Jebaraj, director of the Center for Business and Economic Research at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville.

Since about September, Arkansas has stopped losing people from the labor force, Jebaraj said. From September to December, the state added about 4,700 people to the labor force.

"It's not enough to catch us up from all those we lost in 2018, but nonetheless there was a small increase in the labor force participation rate," Jebaraj said.

The labor force participation rate, which is calculated by dividing the labor force by the population of workers over the age of 16, inched up from 57.4 percent in November to 57.5 percent in December.

The good news in Friday's report was the 3.6 percent unemployment rate and that any job losses from November to December were seasonal, said Greg Kaza, executive director of the Arkansas Policy Foundation in Little Rock.

The bad news is that the Arkansas job creation rate since the end of the recession in June 2009 is only 8.2 percent, compared with the U.S. average of 14.7 percent, Kaza said.

"The best overlooked news is that Arkansas' manufacturing employment has expanded 6.4 percent since hitting its trough this cycle in mid-2013," Kaza said.

For the third-consecutive month, the underlying components of the unemployment rate showed an increase in both the number of employed and the number of unemployed, implying an expanding labor force, said Michael Pakko, chief economist at the Arkansas Economic Development Institute at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock.

From September through December, there was an employment increase of 2,843 and an unemployment increase of 1,881.

There were eight industry sectors that had gains in jobs from December 2017 to last month and three that lost jobs.

All told, there were 16,000 payroll jobs added in the state since December 2017.

The professional and business services sector added the most jobs, 4,200, in the past year, with 2,600 of those jobs coming in the administrative and support services subsector.

Throughout much of the current economic expansion -- since June 2009 -- job growth has been almost entirely concentrated in service-providing sectors, Pakko said.

In recent months, goods-producing sectors -- such as manufacturing and construction -- have been making a comeback, Pakko said.

Manufacturing added 3,900 jobs in the past year.

Manufacturing employment growth is really picking up, Pakko said.

"It's nowhere near where it was [two decades] ago," Pakko said. "But in percentage terms, it's growing much more rapidly than overall employment growth in the state."

There were 161,900 manufacturing jobs in December, compared with 240,000 jobs at the end of 1998.

With the construction sector also adding 2,100 jobs, goods-producing sectors accounted for more than 5 percent of the state's job growth in 2018, Pakko said.

There were 53,000 construction workers in Arkansas in December.

"The construction industry ended 2018 in good shape in nearly all parts of the country, and contractors are optimistic about the volume of work available in 2019," Ken Simonson, chief economist of the Associated General Contractors of America, said in a prepared statement. "But finding workers to execute those projects is likely to be a major challenge"

Iowa had the lowest unemployment rate in December at 2.4 percent, followed by Hawaii and New Hampshire at 2.5 percent each, Idaho at 2.6 percent and North Dakota and Vermont at 2.7 percent each.

The highest unemployment rate was in Alaska with 6.3 percent, followed by West Virginia at 5.1 percent, Louisiana at 4.9 percent, Arizona at 4.8 percent and Mississippi and New Mexico at 4.7 percent each.

Business on 01/19/2019

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