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Once again Central Wisconsin
turned in a fine economic performance. The third quarter of 1987 continued the
trend established during the first quarter of this year. The substantial growth
for Portage,
Marathon,
and Wood counties is documented in Table 2. Unemployment
rates are greatly reduced for all reporting areas. For the first time in a year,
Portage
County
had the lowest unemployment rate in
Central Wisconsin at 4.0070.
Marathon and Wood counties were
close behind at 4.4% each. Compare these figures with third quarter 1982 when
the counties had unemployment rates of 10.3%, 13.8%, and 10.6% respectively. The
unemployment rate for Central
Wisconsin now stands at 4.3%. In contrast,
during the recession era of 1982, the rate was 11.9%. And, for the second
consecutive quarter, the region's unemployment rate remains below that of the
state and nation.
Table 3 displays data pertaining to total employment.
Payrolls increased greatly as each county shared in the expansion. Wood County
led the surge with a 9.5% gain, however Marathon County was the leader in terms
of the absolute number of jobs created, posting an increase of 4,500 over third
quarter 1986. Overall, Central
Wisconsin added 9,300 jobs in the course of
the last year. The nation and state also displayed marked improvement.
Table 4 gives the
Central Wisconsin employment
change by sector. The relatively high paying manufacturing sector displayed the
greatest improvement increasing employment by 2,700 positions. Services, trade,
and government all recorded impressive gains from a year ago. Only construction
was down somewhat employing 300 fewer than in third quarter 1986. In all a grand
total of 5,300 nonfarm jobs were created in Central Wisconsin
during the past year. The employment numbers for industries of particular
importance to the region are given in Table 5. Robust improvement was apparent
in all key sector industries except paper products, an industry suffering from
worldwide overcapacity. Lumber and wood products grew by 1100 positions, food
processing by 600, and finance, insurance and real estate by 500.
As previously
noted, problems in the insurance industry seem to have been overcome (Table
5). Thus, these vitally important industries appear to be on firm ground
which bodes well for the region. To underscore their importance, it should be
noted that these industries represent nearly 26070 of Central Wisconsin's
total non-farm employment.
The business confidence index
in Table 6 shows that regional business execuJ;jves
consider national and local conditions to be slightly improved and expect no
significant changes. Given the economic strength of the past several quarters,
this can be interpreted to mean that the expansion is expected to continue.
These executives are also more optimistic about conditions in their own
industries than they were in June. This is another positive variable for the
regional economy.
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