Payroll Employment Growth During the 21st Century – So Far


Menzie Chinn gets the last word on the most recent news regarding employment growth – except for the fact that I’ll do a small summary of one aspect of his post that took a longer view of the revised payroll survey figure – with my own graph of this revised series from October 2000 to January 2006.

Menzie writes:

By December 2004, payroll employment was -76,000 less than in January 2001. Both the payroll employment series, and the household survey based employment series adjusted to conform to the establishment survey coverage, are plotted in the figure below … Not only has employment growth been unnaturally low in this recovery, it has been – and remains – low relative to even the post-1991 recovery, which was itself marked by slow job creation.

Put another way – payroll employment as of January 2005 was the same as it was as of January 2001, that is, zero growth during Bush’s first term. While it is true that we have had better decent growth over the past year, the cumulative growth during the first five years of this century has been very low for such a time span.