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December 1999, Vol. 122, No. 12
Labor force participation: 75 years of change, 1950-98 and 1998-2025
Howard N Fullerton, Jr.Over the 1950–98 period, most of the increase in the Nation’s labor force participation rate occurred between 1970 and 1990. (See table 1.) During this 20-year period, the participation rate (the proportion of the civilian noninstitutional population 16 years of age and older either at work or actively seeking work) jumped from 60.4 percent to 66.4 percent. This increase coincided with the entry of the baby-boom generation into the labor force, and, most notably, a 14.2-percentage point increase in the aggregate labor force participation rate for women.
It is tempting to ascribe all of the historical increase in the aggregate labor force participation rate to the rising labor force participation rate for women. However, other factors also need to be considered, including the changing age distribution of the population stemming from the baby-boom phenomenon and the changing composition of the population by race and Hispanic origin.1
This excerpt is from an article published in the December 1999 issue of the Monthly Labor Review. The full text of the article is available in Adobe Acrobat's Portable Document Format (PDF). See How to view a PDF file for more information.
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Footnotes
1 The
civilian labor force consists of employed and unemployed persons (excluding
Armed Forces personnel) actively seeking work. Historical data for this series
are from the Current Population Survey, 1947–98, conducted by the Bureau of
the Census for the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
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