URI Expert: Unemployment Rate is Better Than You Think
Monday, May 14, 2012
Despite what other economists are saying, Rhode Island is not on the brink of a double-dip recession, according University of Rhode Island professor Dr. Leonard Lardaro.
In fact, the state’s unemployment rate, which was 11.1 percent in March, is actually probably in the “10-11 percent range,” Lardaro said in his latest Current Conditions Index, a monthly report card that ranks the state’s economic growth on a scale on 0 to 100 based on 12 key indicators.
Lardaro’s monthly breakdown factors in government employment, US consumer sentiment, single-unit housing permits, retail sales, employment services jobs, private service-producing employment, total manufacturing hours, manufacturing wage, labor force, benefit exhaustions, new claims, and the unemployment rate.
GET THE LATEST BREAKING NEWS HERE -- SIGN UP FOR GOLOCAL FREE DAILY EBLASTDuring the month, the only indicators that didn’t see improvement were government employment (down 1.6 percent), single-unit permits (down 14 percent), private service-producing employment (down .4 percent) and the labor force (down 1.1 percent).
"Rhode Island ended the first quarter of 2012 on a positive note, as a re-acceleration from the mid-2011 doldrums materialized,” Lardaro said. "While Current Conditions Index values based on the faulty existing labor market data continued to show readings barely above stall speed, allowing for likely data revisions, the CCI beat or tied its year-earlier values for every month in the first quarter."
Lardaro said the first quarter of the year was "fairly good" to Rhode Island, "as the pace of economic activity accelerated, ending the doldrums it found itself stuck in during the second half of 2011."
Still, Lardaro said economic activity is still poor in the state.
"While Rhode Island’s economy is doing better than it has in some time, what I am able to discern from non-survey-based data and the unofficial assurances of the DLT is that overall economic activity here remains far below where it was prior to 'The Great Recession.' Happily, though, Rhode Island’s rate of growth rate hasn’t decoupled from that of the US,” he said.
