CWRI

Annual revisions to labor force and nonfarm payroll jobs estimates have been published. Those revisions, based on more complete data, indicate the unemployment rate was little changed throughout 2016 and nonfarm payroll job growth was stronger than previously thought. Data cited in this brief is seasonally adjusted.   Unemployment Rate   Estimates released on a monthly basis throughout the year indicated that unemployment reached lows of 3.4 percent in the spring and highs of 4.1 percent in the fall. Revisions based on more complete data indicate unemployment was not quite as low in the spring (3.7 percent) or as high in the fall (4.0 percent), ending the year at 3.8 percent in December. Given margins of error in the survey sample, there was essentially no change in the unemployment rate last year.   Unemployment rates were below 4 percent in 12 of the last 15 months, which is historically unusual. In the last 40 years, unemployment was below 4 percent in two ...

The monthly release of unemployment rate and nonfarm payroll jobs estimates is among the most widely followed set of economic indicators in the United States. News accounts often portray net payroll job growth as “hiring” or net job loss as “layoffs.” Neither characterization is correct. In any given month the number of people who were hired or who separated from a job is much larger than the net job change. Patterns of Hires and Separations During and shortly after the 2008 to 2009 recession, the number of nonfarm jobs in Maine declined by nearly 25,000 to an average of 593,000 in 2010. Though many individuals lost their jobs, the large net job losses occurred despite the fact that the number of job separations declined by more than 9,000 per quarter. Net job losses were primarily due to an even larger decline in hires than separations. Primary Job Hires and Separations in Maine     In the jobs recovery from 2010 through 2015, the number of nonfarm jobs in ...

The 2008–2009 recession and aftermath caused employment to decline among private for profit businesses, the self-employed, and government before the jobs recovery took hold in 2011. The exception was private sector nonprofits, which added jobs throughout the downturn and recovery. Employment in private nonprofits increased 15,000 from 2005 to 2015; during the same period, total employment declined and then recovered to about the same level as a decade earlier. The 86,000 private nonprofit jobs in 2015 made up 13 percent of employment, up from 11 percent in 2005.   Job growth in private nonprofit entities has been more robust than any other employer class in the last decade       The preceding data and chart was drawn from the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, which collects information on the number of people employed in nonprofits each year. Because of variability in estimates from year to year, we have used three-year averages. Estim...