Author: Llad Phillips

The Santa Barbara County Economic Summit event was held nearly three months ago on May 5, but uncertainty continues about the economy and especially the labor market. The UCSB Economic Forecast Project is using its blog on the home page http://www.ucsb-efp.com/ to provide updates on current topics on a regular basis.

Data for nonfarm employment in the United States, seasonally adjusted, may be found at FRED, the St. Louis Fed, http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/. Employment for June is 131,017,000. The shaded areas in this plot are the recessions, with the timing determined by the National Bureau of Economic Research.

The corresponding graph for nonfarm employment, seasonally adjusted, for Santa Barbara County follows. The data is obtained from the California Employment Development Department http://www.edd.ca.gov/ and is maintained as a data set by the UCSB Economic Forecast Project. The seasonally adjusted number of employed for June is 162,500.

Total nonfarm employment for the state of California, seasonally adjusted, can be obtained from the California Employment Development Department, referenced above, and a plot is shown below, comparable to the plots above for the nation and for the county. The seasonally adjusted number of employed for June is 14,068,600., 10.7% of the national number.

US, California, and Santa Barbara County Forecasts for the remainder of 2011

The Survey of Professional Forecasters can be found on the web site of The Federal Reserve of Philadelphia, http://www.philadelphiafed.org/research-and-data/real-time-center/survey-of-professional-forecasters/ . Forecasts of many economic variables at the national level are published quarterly. There are usually forty or so forecasters participating, listed with the quarterly forecast, such as Rajeev Dhawan at Georgia State University, Allen Sinai at Decision Economics Inc. and Mark Zandi at Moody’s Analytics to name a few. A table of forecasts for nonfarm employment follows.

Forecasts of Non-farm Employment 2011:

The California Department of Finance publishes quarterly forecasts of numerous economic variables including nonfarm employment, http://www.dof.ca.gov/HTML/FS_DATA/LatestEconData/FS_Forecasts.htm

The forecasts of non-farm employment, seasonally adjusted, for the county of Santa Barbara were provided by the author for the UCSB Economic Forecast Project. A plot of the monthly forecasts for July through December 2011 follows. We expect the actual employment numbers will fall between the upper(green) and lower(black) lines.

Summary

Nonfarm employment is forecasted to increase by 1.3% at the national level between the first and fourth quarters of this year. The corresponding figure for California is 1.2%. The outlook is comparable for Santa Barbara County where employment is forecasted to increase by 1.0%, about the level it had fallen to in June of 2009.

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