The Golden Triangle saw an impressive dip in unemployment rates over the past month, but the numbers, while generally encouraging, can be a bit deceiving.
February’s unemployment rates fell anywhere from 1.2 to 1.8 percent in the three Golden Triangle counties, as well as Noxubee County, and there were 700 fewer people listed as unemployment in February than in January, according to statistics released Wednesday by the Mississippi Department of Employment Security.
Mary Willoughby, of the MDES’ labor information department, said the drop may be more a matter of students returning to school after working the holidays than a surge in jobless people finding work.
“Unemployment in every county in the state went down last month,” Willoughby said. “It is very much a seasonal pattern. The big factor is that as of the recording date each month, which falls on the 12th, many, if not most, of the colleges and universities have not started classes, so those students are considered unemployed at that time. When school starts again, those students come off the unemployment rolls and that skews the statistics. It’s something we see every year, a big change from January to February.”
Unlike county jobless statistics, unemployment on the national and state levels are adjusted to take into account what it calls “seasonal adjustments” such as the start and end of school semesters.
Mississippi’s seasonally-adjusted unemployment rate dropped by 0.1 percent over between January and February and now stands at 7.0 percent while the national seasonally-adjusted unemployment rate dropped by 0.2 percent, from 5.7 percent in January to 5.5 percent in February. That represents a 1.2 percent decline from February 2014. Mississippi’s unemployment rate fell by 0.8 percent over that one-year period.
Slim Smith is a columnist and feature writer for The Dispatch. His email address is [email protected].
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