Unemployment in Mississippi continued in 2018 at historically low rates, according to information released this week by the Mississippi Department of Employment Security.
Mississippi’s seasonally adjusted unemployment rate for January 2018 was 4.6 percent, the lowest rate for Mississippi since the U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics began calculating state unemployment rates in 1976.
The seasonally adjusted number of people unemployed decreased 2,600 since December 2017. The January seasonally adjusted number of unemployed individuals at 58,300 is the lowest for the state since August 1979.
In January 2018, there were 600 more jobs in Mississippi than in December 2017, according to the seasonally adjusted results from a survey of Mississippi employers. The number of non-farm jobs increased 12,200 over the year. The current 1,162,600 jobs in Mississippi are the most jobs in the state since the U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics began calculating state non-farm seasonally adjusted jobs numbers in 1990.
Seasonally adjusted data, calculated at the state and national level only, removes the effects of events that follow a more or less regular pattern each year such as the influences of weather, holidays, the opening and closing of schools and other recurring seasonal events.
In the Golden Triangle area, unemployment ticked up slightly over the past month in three of the four counties with Clay county reporting no change from December.
Still, compared to a year ago, the jobless rate has fallen significantly among those counties – by 1.8 percent in Lowndes County, 1.4 percent in Oktibbeha County, 2.3 percent in Clay County and 1.5 percent in Noxubee County.
Slim Smith is a columnist and feature writer for The Dispatch. His email address is [email protected].
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