More Records for N. Dakota's Booming Oil Economy
| State Employment, Top 10 by Annual % Increase | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| State | July 2010 | July 2011 | % Change | |
| 1. | North Dakota | 375,300 | 395,000 | 5.25% |
| 2. | Texas | 10,350,300 | 10,619,800 | 2.60% |
| 3. | Utah | 1,183,700 | 1,213,400 | 2.51% |
| 4. | Wyoming | 282,500 | 288,800 | 2.23% |
| 5. | Oklahoma | 1,531,800 | 1,565,800 | 2.22% |
| 6. | Massachusetts | 3,190,000 | 3,246,800 | 1.78% |
| 7. | Hawaii | 585,700 | 595,600 | 1.69% |
| 8. | Oregon | 1,600,000 | 1,625,300 | 1.58% |
| 9. | Kentucky | 1,770,400 | 1,798,300 | 1.58% |
| 10. | Michigan | 3,882,100 | 3,942,100 | 1.55% |
The BLS released data today for July state employment and unemployment. Thanks to its ongoing oil boom (see recent CD post "More Records for North Dakota's Booming Oil Economy), North Dakota led the country with the greatest year-over-year job growth at 5.25%, slightly more than double the 2.6% job growth in second-place Texas (see chart above). North Dakota also leads the country with the lowest July jobless rate of 3.3%, far below the national rate of 9.1% and almost a full percentage point below second-place Nebraska at 4.1%. Texas wasn't even close at 8.4%, ranking 27th in the country for July jobless rates.
North Dakota also led the country with a 6.9% growth in personal income for the first quarter of 2011, much higher than the 2.6% growth for the next two states: Wyoming and Texas. In 2010, North Dakota was the state with the highest growth in real state GDP at 7.1%, far ahead of second -place New York at 5.1%, and more than twice the 2.8% rate in Texas.
Related: See Catherine Rampell's post today at the Economix blog titled "The North Dakota Miracle," which starts with "Forget the Texas Miracle. Let's instead look at North Dakota..."
5 Comments:
It's interesting that most of those 20,000 new jobs in ND are likely blue-collar. There have been many, for decades now, who have assumed that America has somehow transitioned -- along some inexorable economic path -- to an economy which demands higher education. Mining and manufacturing will simply move elsewhere.
That's just the way of things.
This chart shows, in a small way, just how foolish an idea that is. There is no predestined passage to a "developed" economy that no longer needs manual labor. There are just environmental regulations, corporate and capital taxes and an inflationary monetary policy that work to make it uneconomical here.
Luckily, for North Dakotans (long-time and newly-arrived), high oil prices are overcoming those obstacles and giving hope to a lot of people.
It is difficult to 'forget the Texas Miracle." The state is huge; it added more jobs than North Dakota has jobs.
Even more assuring, it added jobs across a broad array of industries as opposed to riding the energy wave a la North Dakota. We suspect if Obama had not effectively shut down gulf oil exploration and development the state would be performing even more gloriously.
If North Dakota is doing so well, let's push onward & annex Manitoba.
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I was curious about the Michigan listing in the top ten for increasing employment, so I went to the state website to dig around a bit. Here's what I found:
1. The unemployment rate is down over 1% YoY for July but the curve looks like it is now increasing since April 2011.
2. The seasonally adjusted payroll jobs have increased 23,000 since last month and 60,000 YoY.
3. The largest increases in Michigan employment from Jan 2011 to July 2011 occurred in professional and business services (most from professional and scientific!), education and health services, manufacturing, and ...local government?
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