Thursday, July 22, 2010

Latest Declines in Employment Population Ratio


One of the series I track with particular interest is the employment-population ratio for men aged 25-54.  See here for prior posts and discussion.  In general, I feel that it's a better long-term indicator of the trends in employment than the official unemployment rate.

The depressing point to make in this post is that, when the series had barely just started recovering from the low of the recession in late 2009, it has now gone down slightly in the last two months of data (from 81.3% in April to 81.2% in May, and then 81.1% in June).  Whether that's a statistically significant decline I'm not sure, but it's certainly not a strong recovery.

The corresponding rate for women is here:

It's not increasing either.

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