Pennsylvania has some good news, but North Dakota is leading the pack. A recent analysis of the state unemployment numbers suggest that North Dakota was the only state that has improved since the Great Recession.
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The state now has 14,100 more jobs than it needed to reach the pre-recession levels. This achievement is significant, considering there was a 3.66% increase in working age adults during the time.
According to the Bureau of Economic Analysis, the farmers of North Dakota benefited from the rising prices of wheat and personal incomes also increased by 4.26% in the first quarter of the year. The miners also saw an increase in their wages by almost 0.5%.
Pennsylvania will need 235,200 more jobs than it had in May to match the pre-recession levels. An analysis by the Washington D.C. research organization, Economic Policy Institute, shows that the state’s unemployment rate was only 4.5% in Dec 2007 and in May this year it has increased by almost 3% to reach 7.4%. Calculating unemployment is not really just about taking the difference between the number of people who worked in 2007 and the number of people working now; the increase in the number of working age adults also need to be considered, which has increased by 1.79% since the recession.
Still, Pennsylvania is one among the few states that are doing well, especially in terms of the percentage of jobs that is needed for the economy to bounce back to the levels before recession. If Pennsylvania needs a 4.1% increase in its jobs to get back to pre-recession, Nevada, whose economy is just one fifth of that of Pennsylvania, needs a 19.8% increase. California needs a 12.7% increase in its current job base, which translates to 1.8 million jobs. In West Virginia, the working age population increase was just 1.2%, and it needs just 20,800 jobs to get back to the pre-recession level. That puts West Virginia just behind North Dakota, as the second best economy in the country for jobs.
Every state but North Dakota will need to add new jobs. But according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis figures, the first quarter of the year saw almost 2% increase in personal income, corresponding to the 2% reduction in Social Security taxes taken from workers. The Bureau analyzed personal income in every state and found that the income grew by 1.8% as against the 0.8% growth in the last quarter of 2010. But there is the 0.9% inflation that will most likely swallow this growth.
Personal income growth seems to have a huge variance across the country, with 0.7% in Iowa to 6.9% in North Dakota. Pennsylvania recorded a 1.9% growth in the first quarter, which puts it at the 17th spot for personal income growth. For Pennsylvania famers, there was a slight dip in the earnings, but durable goods manufacturing workers saw a 0.18% increase. Mining, warehousing and transportation workers saw income rise by 0.05%, retail workers by 0.06% and Finance and Insurance employees by a 0.07% wage increase.
