It is something of a puzzle: The slide into recession-level unemployment comes against the backdrop of falling layoffs, rising tax revenue and the silhouettes of construction cranes against the skyline of Atlanta.
“A rising unemployment rate does fly in the fact of common sense,” said Mark Vitner, a senior economist at Wells Fargo in Charlotte, N.C. “There is no doubt that Georgia’s economy is improving.”
As evidence, he noted the sight of construction crews and the sound of hammers. Backing that up is the feds’ survey of payrolls that shows the state added 88,700 jobs in the past year — 42,600 since April.
But wait: there is another federal survey, the “household” survey used to calculate the unemployment rate. And that one says the number of employed people has dropped by 52,784 since April.
Is one survey utterly wrong? Or can they both be right? Experts start by shaking their heads.
“I don’t know what is going on with Georgia — it’s a big ol’ black box,” said M. Melinda Pitts, the director of the Center for Human Capital Studies at the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta. “There are lots of discrepancies between the surveys. You have them going in different directions at the same time.”
via Georgia’s unemployment rate, jobs data tell two stories | www.myajc.com.
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