I thought I would add another brief look at the data on North Dakota’s labor market before we close up the year with new data releases next week. Once again these data go through November of 2016, and start in the immediate aftermath of the problems in the oil industry.
Continue reading A little more labor, ND labor force and unemployment rate
Just a brief post about employment since the oil boom ended. As we are all aware we went right into a bust after the boom, which is not always the case, but that is a topic for another day. With that in mind I looked at the employment data since that time, essentially early 2015. Now keep in mind there were significant gains made, and I am not even close to claiming that we gave up all the gains, but we can identify the specific change event so it makes sense to look at variables after that event.
Continue reading North Dakota Employment, post boom (briefly)
By now it is well documented, here and perhaps everywhere, that North Dakota experienced a significant economic transition over the last ten years. How permanent and sustainable a change is the current question. At the risk of editorializing too much I will just point out, that is almost always the question, and we seldom have an answer until well after the fact. This issue aside, I looked at the median income data by county in North Dakota. The data are the 5-year estimates from the Census Bureau. If you want all counties in the state that is the data series you need to employ, and since I want to look at counties across the state that is what I chose. I took each county median income measure and divided it by the median income for the state as a whole to see how the individual counties changed over time. The first year was 2009.
Continuing the look at economic differences across the state of North Dakota, today we turn to look at retail. One of the more aggravating things when you try to look at data at the county level are the redactions of information due to privacy concerns. I am not so much complaining about privacy rules are just venting that it makes the analysis less than complete because we do not know the situation for all counties. Here is what North Dakota looked like in 2015: