F lorida S ummar y
housing boom. Average job growth in State and Local Government during 2022-2025 will be 1.3%, with annual growth rising to 3.6% in 2022 and decelerating thereafter. The recession may put some pressure on both sales tax and property tax revenues, but this should not result in severe budgetary issues.
Federal Government employment growth in Florida strengthened over 2020 because of the Decennial Census, but historic deficits and a national debt of nearly $30 trillion will become a factor going forward. Average job growth in the Federal Government sector in Florida will average just 0.6% during 2022-2025, with growth having turned negative during 2021 after the temporary hiring surge during the 2020 census year.
U N E M P LOY M E N T The unemployment rate in Florida has fallen from its May 2020 peak of 14.2% and stands at 3.0% as of May 2022. When unemployment spiked to 14.2% in May of 2020, it was 2.9 percentage points higher than the peak level of unemployment from the Great Recession. This unprecedented surge in unemployment occurred over just three months, while it took two-and-a-half years for the unemployment rate to reach its peak in the Great Recession. Nationally, and in Florida, the level of workers who are working part-time but not by choice, and workers marginally attached to the labor force— defined as workers who are neither working nor currently looking for work but indicate that they want and are available for a job and have looked for work in the past 12 months—also spiked during the public health shutdowns. When adding these
workers and discouraged workers—defined as workers who are currently not working and did not look for a job in the four weeks preceding the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ monthly survey of households—to the headline unemployment figure, U-3, we get the broadest measure of unemployment estimated by the BLS, known as U-6.
Looking at U-6, we see a labor market that is still not fully recovered from the trauma of public health measures. U-6 in Florida averaged 7.6% during the 2nd quarter of 2021 through the 2nd quarter of 2022. Meanwhile, the national rate of U-6 averaged 8.4% during the same period. U-6 unemployment in Florida during the 2nd quarter of 2021 through the 2nd quarter of 2022 was 5.2 percentage points below the rate in 2014, 8.4 points lower than the 16% rate in 2012, and down 11.7 percentage points from its peak average rate of 19.3% in 2010 (the nation’s U-6 averaged 16.7% in 2010). As the economy continues to recover and the COVID-19 pandemic abates, these numbers will continue to fall in Florida through the end of 2022, before climbing again during the recession. Analysis of how U-6 behaves relative to the headline unemployment rate (U-3) continues to provide important information necessary to fully understand the health of the labor market. The gap between these two measures continues to narrow. The average spread between U-6 and U-3 in 2021 was hovering at 3.7 percentage points at the national level, while that gap was 3.7 percentage points in Florida.
Institute for Economic Forecasting
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