Bruce Hall takes issue with my post on Wisconsin’s employment growth, and writes (sarcastically):
Looks as if every state in the midwest is doing fine except Wisconsin.
Mebbe the unsarcastic interpretation is more correct. I let readers assess, based on these graphs.
August total NFP and private NFP also revised downward.
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According to the Philly Fed coincident indices.
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Maybe. But not as of 2018M01.
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As Wisconsinites will recall, as late as August 2013, Governor Walker was reiterating his promise to create 250,000 new private sector jobs by the end of his first term (January 2015). As of July 2018, Wisconsin’s private sector net job creation surpassed Walker’s promised target — a full 3.5 years late.
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In a recent paper, Ryan LeCloux and I use five macroeconomic measures to assess state economic performance (post). Here, I use updated data to evaluate Minnesota’s economic performance vis à vis Wisconsin: GDP, personal income, nonfarm payroll employment, civilian employment, and coincident indices and “adjusted” coincident indices.
The June coincident index flattens out; the leading index, released today, predicts a 1.1% growth over the next six months. Minnesota’s forecasted growth is over twice that rate.
Ever since the Walker Administration ended the issuance of the Wisconsin Economic Outlook (last issue May 2015), those of us outside of the government have been a little in the dark when trying to assess state level economic conditions in a systematic manner. In a recent paper (updated version 8/1), Ryan LeCloux and I assess how various macroeconomic aggregates track the Wisconsin economy at higher-than-annual frequency. Investigating the behavior of these series yields the following graph.
According to data released today, Wisconsin ranks 40th in the first read on 2018Q1 state GDP growth. Washington state ranks first (even though it’s ranked 37th for economic outlook in the 2018 ALEC-Arthur Laffer-Steven Mooore-Jonathan Williams Rich States Poor States).
Ed Hanson writes, after plotting the data:
The graph shows, in general, Minnesota’s increasing gap of per capita income over Wisconsin since at least 1970. It is not just since 2011 that this trend began.
This observation is right in a way — wrong in a deeper, more economically interesting, way. Investigation highlights the usefulness of the log function.