Arkansas’ job growth has improved slightly, with the state’s unemployment rate staying at 6.2% in November, just under the U.S. jobless rate of 6.7%.
Dr. Michael Pakko, cheif economist with AEDI, was interviewed about the topic. “The pace of economic recovery has slowed. What we’re seeing in the state report is what we saw in the national report a few weeks ago, and that is suggesting we’ve exhausted the easy recovery gains…Now it’s more of a gradual process to get back to normality, whatever that might be.”
Pakko says that Arkansas’ is performing better than the nation in regards to job recovery. The analysis shows that, as of November, Arkansas has recovered nearly two-thirds of the initial job losses from February through April, while the nation has recovered just over half of the jobs lost in the same period.
“The jobs losses that we saw in March and April were across the board, but many of those sectors have come back substantially. We’re clearly making progress toward recovery, but there’s only so much that we can expect while we still have sectors that are operating undercapacity,” concluded Pakko.
Read the full article on the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette website here.
