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The Stevens Point area economic results for Third Quarter are as follows: the
unemployment rate is above last year's figure; meanwhile total employment is
up by about 3 percent; however, manufacturing sector employment has not done
well; retailers are less optimistic than in past periods; and help wanted
advertising took a big plunge. Moreover, some measures of local family
distress have deteriorated over the year, and construction activity, while
brisk, has fallen off lasts year's pace.
As shown in Table 7, Portage county manufacturing
employment declined by about 1.5 percent from a year ago. Likewise service
sector employment and construction employment declined by 1.5 and 15.4 percent
respectively. Better news comes from the trade sector, which grew at an 8.5
percent rate, and from the government sector where payrolls are about 12.0
percent higher than a year ago. A word of caution is in order for the reported
gain in government employment. Government employment tends to fluctuate from
year to year. However, the growth trend for government payrolls has been flat
for many years. In other words the reported gain is most likely a temporary
fluctuation.
Merchants in the local area are not very optimistic in their assessment of
recent activity in store traffic and sales (Table 8).
Basically this group believes that economic conditions are stuck in neutral as
far as they are concerned. With regard to future sales and store traffic, this
group is forecasting that activity will be at about the same level as one year
ago. Remember, this forecast period also covers the crucial Christmas selling
season.
A good barometer of future labor market conditions is help wanted advertising.
As shown in Table 9, the index for Stevens Point fell
from 176 to 105 over the past year, indicating a 40 percent drop in
advertising. This does not bode well for job seekers and suggests that
business firms are not in a strong hiring mode. The help wanted advertising
index for the U.S. is at a very low level. The 41 recorded in May means that
there are only 41 jobs being advertised for every 100 positions in the base
year 1987. This too would indicate that employers throughout the country are
quite reluctant to add to their firm's payrolls.
Public assistance claims and unemployment claim data are measures of local
family financial distress (Table 10). This quarter's
results contain both good and bad news. The good news is that new public
assistance claims and new unemployment claims are lower than a year ago. This
may be a sign that the local labor market is beginning to stabilize. The bad
news is that the total public assistance claim figure and the total
unemployment claim figures are higher than a year ago (Table
11). This suggests that there has been an accumulated increase in the
level of family financial distress.
The construction data for residential activity shows that while building
remains brisk, it is somewhat off the very robust pace of a year ago (Table
12). The number of new permits issued rose by 52 percent, but the value of
the construction was only about 1 percent higher than in 2001. In addition,
the number of housing units is estimated to have declined by about 18 percent.
Moreover, the number of residential permits issued contracted by an estimated
4.4 percent from last year.
Percentage
changes are not given for nonresidential activity (Table 13).
This activity tends to be very volatile from period to period. A major project
or two can cause the numbers to greatly change. For this quarter the number of
permits issued was 7 and they had an estimated value of approximately $2.2
million. With regard to alteration activity, the number of permits issued was
53 and they were valued at $4.4 million. Generally speaking the activity of
this year was off the dollar pace of a year ago. |
