TN Job Loss Patterns in Six Recessions
February 10, 2009 by Ken Marrero
Filed under Economy
Promoted from John Scott’s Right at Home.
In a previous post, I called attention to some comparisons different economists, bloggers, reporters, and others have done between this recession and previous recessions.
There’s no doubt that we are in a recession and that a particularly brutal part of the current economic woes are the job losses that many have experienced. The contention of the previous post was that the job losses in the current recession are not that much different from previous recessions, contrary to much of the hyperbole and rhetoric proclaiming this to be the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.
I thought it would be interesting to do the same kind of analysis on Tennessee unemployment trends in previous recessions compared to the current recession. Here’s the graph of the data:
Clearly the data for our state doesn’t follow the exact same trends as the national data. Some of the respective recessions have resulted in longer or shorter periods of job loss than occured nationally. Some of the recessions appear to had more volatile job loss patterns in Tennessee, which makes sense; the larger pool of jobs across the country should have smoothed out the national pattern more than what you would see on a more localized basis. One can see that Tennessee experienced a much higher percent of job loss in both the 1974 and 1981 recessions than was the national average.
In this recession, however, Tennessee’s current job loss percentage is right in line with the national average. While the job loss percentage appears to have dropped more quickly in this recession than in 1974 and 1981, the trend appears to have generally leveled off for the time being, at least in comparison with the wild downward slide of both 1974 and 1981. One can hope that that trend will continue, and we can avoid the 5-7% drops in employment that were experienced in those two recessions.
To this point, in Tennessee, the current recession does not appear to be anywhere near as bad as the 1974 and 1981 recessions. My concern would be with the impact that will be felt in Tennessee from the currently proposed interventions at the national level. Will the additional tax burden, deficits, governmental debt and the resulting reduction in GDP (as predicted by the CBO) result in additional job losses for Tennessee?
