Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
State’s jobless rate falls to 7.6%
January lowest level since ’09
Arkansas’ unemployment rate in January dropped to its lowest level since August 2009, falling to 7.6 percent from 7.8 percent in December, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics said Tuesday.
Job growth in January “on a year-over-year basis ... was stronger than any month since April,” said Kathy Deck, director of the Center for Business and Economic Research at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville.
Nonfarm jobs rose by 3,900 in January from a year earlier, Deck said.
The number of Arkansans holding jobs in January reached 1,277,300, up 5,900 from December 2011, the highest total since December 2008. And there were 105,200 unemployed in January — 1,900 fewer than in December 2011 — the lowest total of unemployed since November 2009.
“The state is moving similarly to the nation,” Deck said. “The labor force grew, employment grew and what caused them to grow was not just people dropping out of the labor force.”
The national unemployment rate in January was 8.3 percent, down from 8.5 percent in December.
Deck doesn’t think it’s likely that Arkansas’ unem--
ployment rate will fall below 7 percent this year.
Michael Pakko, chief economist at the Institute for Economic Advancement at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, said he expects that Arkansas will have stronger growth this year than last year.
Because of the annual revision by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Arkansas had a worse year in 2011 for jobs creation than earlier reported.
The revision shows that Arkansas lost about 3,100 jobs last year, compared with the initial report that the state had gained up to 12,000.
In November, Pakko had projected the revision would show that Arkansas would have job losses last year instead of job gains.
The revision made more sense out of statistics that last year seemed confusing, Deck said.
“Last year, the metropolitan [statistical area] numbers were lower than the state numbers were,” Deck said. “And I kept saying, ‘If that is right, where is all this rural job growth coming from?’ It turns out that was wrong. The metro area that got revised [ downward] substantially was Fort Smith, which looks much worse now than it did before.”
In Arkansas, six industry sectors had increases in jobs from January 2011 to January 2012 — educational and health services with 3,700 more jobs, followed by government with 3,000 more; leisure and hospitality with 2,400 more; construction with 1,700 more; trade, transportation and utilities with 1,000 more; and mining and logging 100 more.
Five sectors in Arkansas lost jobs since January 2011 — manufacturing with 4,400 fewer jobs; professional and business services with 1,700 fewer; financial activities with 900 fewer; information with 800 fewer; and “other services” with 200 fewer.
It was not surprising that manufacturing continues to lose jobs, Deck said. The sector has lost 61,000 jobs since January 2002.
“We keep getting good announcements [in manufacturing], like Welspun in Little Rock [which said last month it would add 200 jobs],” Deck said. “But the next day you hear tough news. So it is going to be a tough row to hoe [to turn manufacturing around].”
Nevada continued to have the country’s highest unemployment rate in January at 12.7 percent, followed by California and Rhode Island at 10.9 percent each, North Carolina at 10.2 percent and Mississippi at 9.9 percent.
North Dakota again had the lowest unemployment rate at 3.2 percent, followed by Nebraska at 4.0 percent, South Dakota at 4.2 percent, Vermont at 5.0 percent and New Hampshire at 5.2 percent.