From John Taylor.
For each month of this recovery, I’ve been tracking the change in the
employment-to-population ratio and comparing it with the recovery from
the previous deep recession in the 1980s. Here is the latest update
based on today’s release of February data:
and here is a post from 2011 for
comparison. It’s remarkable that there’s still no take-off and the
percentage employed is still below what it was a bottom of the
recession.
As would be expected after so many disappointing years, some are now
seeing this as a secular issue of low labor force participation
unrelated to the slow recovery from the recession. But research by Chris
Erceg and Andy Levin, (Labor Force Participation and Monetary Policy in the Wake of the Great Recession) provides
what they consider to be “compelling evidence that cyclical factors
account for the bulk of the post-2007 decline in labor force
participation.” One convincing piece of evidence is their chart (see
below) which shows the labor force participation rate (LFPR) projection
by BLS and CBO before the downturn based on the demographics about which
there have been no surprise. The actual LFPR (63.0 percent as of
today) is well below these projections.
Wednesday, March 12, 2014
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.