September 1998, Vol. 121, No. 9
Labor month in review
The
September Review
Fewer youths hired this summer
Psychotherapeutic drug's producer prices rise
MLR Online archive growing
Organizations such as the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the President’s Commission on the Employment of Persons with Disabilities have long promoted an increased flow of information on the work activity of persons with disabilities. The lead article by Thomas W. Hale, Howard V. Hayghe, and John McNeil and the article by Douglas L. Kruse take advantage of a module of questions in the Census Bureau’s Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) to generate some baseline data on the labor market status and associated socio-economic characteristics of persons with disabilities. The two articles reach similar conclusions: Persons who report nonsevere disabilities are quite similar to persons without disability, but persons with severe disabilities are less likely to be active in the labor market, more likely to be out of work, and are likely to be living on a lower monthly income.
A recent report in Health Affairs on the Health Care Finance Administration’s projections of medical spending notes, "Expenditures for drugs are expected to grow at fairly rapid rates through 2007 as a result of rising utilization (number of prescriptions) and intensity (including changes in size and mix of prescriptions)." The note below on recent trends in producer prices for psychotherapeutic drugs demonstrates the impact price changes among even very specific drug classes can have. In their article, Ernst Berndt and his co-authors address another issue in measuring drug prices—diverse patterns of price change across demographic groups. They find that at the initial point in the distribution chain (generally, those prices monitored by the Bureau’s producer price program), there is "essentially no age-related aggregate price inflation differential." They also find no general pattern of difference in the acquisition prices of retail pharmacies, but do suggest that for at least some prescriptions, younger retail consumers have realized more of the benefit of a slight decline in prices.
John Duke and Lisa Usher deliver a complete description of the expansion of the Bureau’s industry productivity database that we announced in this space last month. An expanded set of industry productivity series now appears in table 42 of the Current Labor Statistics department at the back of the book.
Fewer youths hired this summer
The number of employed youth increased by 2.5 million from April to July, the traditional summertime peak for youth employment. This year’s seasonal expansion in employment of 16- to 24-year-olds was lower than the 2.8 million increase in 1997. The number of unemployed young people, which also grows at this time every year, rose by 702,000. (Because this is an analysis of the changes in youth employment and unemployment that occur every summer, the data are not adjusted for seasonal variations.)
A total of 21.6 million youth were employed this July. The industries employing the largest numbers of young workers were retail trade, services, manufacturing, and construction. Retail trade alone accounted for about one-third of youth employment. The number of unemployed youth in July (2.6 million) was not much different than in the previous year. The youth unemployment rate was 10.8 percent before seasonal adjustment. (For more information, see news release USDL 98–386, Employment and Unemployment Among Youth—Summer 1998.)
Psychotherapeutic drug's producer prices rise
The PPI for prescription pharmaceuticals is a weighted average of some 47 separate indexes for individual therapeutic categories of drugs. In the 12 months ended in January 1998, the PPI for prescription pharmaceuticals rose 3.0 percent. The run up between January and July was primarily the result of large increases in the psychotherapeutics category. That index rose 12.7 percent in February, 183.4 percent in March, and 5.7 percent in July. Over the 6-month span, the index for psychotherapeutics rose from 445.2 in January to 1503.0 in July.
The recent run up in the psychotherapeutics index had a considerable impact on aggregate producer price indexes. The PPI for all finished goods decreased 0.3 percent in the year ended in July 1998; the PPI for finished goods exclusive of psychotherapeutics decreased by twice as much (0.6 percent) over the period.
While the January-July increases accurately reflected the actual price data reported by the firms sampled by the PPI for psychotherapeutics, the recent large increase in the psychotherapeutics index was the result of price changes by a small number of producers for a small number of individual drugs. Thus, sampling variability may well have played a role in the recent behavior of the PPI for prescription pharmaceuticals. For more information, go to http://www.bls.gov/ppi/ppidrug.htm
The Web edition of Monthly Labor Review (http://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/mlrhome.htm) has completed the first tranche of its archive. The archive now contains a Portable Document Format (.pdf) record of every article published from 1990 to 1997. The Index Button takes you to individual indexes for the most current years (1996 and 1997) and a combined index for 1991 through the present. A text file of indexed articles from 1990 to the present also is available.
Communications regarding the Monthly Labor Review may be sent to the Editor-in-Chief at 2 Massachusetts Avenue NE, Room 2850, Washington, DC, 20212, or faxed to (202) 691–5899.
News releases discussed above are available at: http://www.bls.gov/bls/newsrels.htm
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