Economic policy reports, blog postings, and media stories of interest:
The Economic Policy compares the distribution of income growth between two periods: 1948-1979 and 2000-2007. Over time, the distribution of income growth has become extremely lopsided.
Writing in The American Prospect, Lawrence Mishel of the Economic Policy Institute argues that a better-educated workforce is not a cure-all for economic problems.
The huge increase in wage and income inequality over the last 30 years was not caused by a skills deficit. Rather, workers face a “wage deficit.” The key challenge is to provide good jobs and re-establish the basis for wages and compensation to grow in tandem with productivity, as they did before 1979.
…
We do need more investment in education at all levels, so that the children of the working class have a better opportunity to compete for good jobs. We also need what Europeans call an active labor-market policy, so that the money we invest in training is directly connected to re-employment at good wages, rather than operating in a vacuum.
…
The nation’s productivity increased by 80 percent from 1979 to 2009, and good productivity growth can be expected in the future. It is not education gaps that have caused nearly all of those gains to be captured by the top but rather economic policies that redistributed economic and political power.
Economic policy reports, blog postings, and media stories of interest:
For the benefit week ending on January 22nd, 13,298 North Carolinians filed initial claims for state unemployment insurance benefits, and 137,633 individuals applied for state-funded continuing benefits. Compared to the prior week, there were fewer initial and continuing claims. These figures come from data released by the U.S. Department of Labor.
Averaging new and continuing claims over a four-week period — a process that helps adjust for seasonal fluctuations and better illustrates trends — shows that an average of 22,963 initial claims were filed over the previous four weeks, along with an average of 146,817 continuing claims. Compared to the previous four-week period, there were fewer initial and continuing claims.
One year ago, the four-week average for initial claims stood at 26,323 and the four-week average of continuing claims equaled 215,063.
While the number of claims has dropped over the past year so has covered employment. Last week, covered employment totaled 3.7 million, down from 3.9 million a year ago.
The graph (right) shows the changes in unemployment insurance claims (as a share of covered employment) in North Carolina since the recession’s start in December 2007.
Both new and continuing claims appear to have peaked for this cycle, and the four-week averages of new and continuing claims have fallen considerably. Yet continuing claims remain at an elevated level, which suggests that unemployed individuals are finding it difficult to find new positions.
Email Sign-Up | 
RSS Feed
