Labor month in review
The
July Review
Growth, immigration and education
The single poor
Productivity at full retail
The recent revision of the welfare system to encourage more labor market participation by welfare recipients stimulated the research in the first two articles. Robert I. Lerman and Caroline Ratcliffe of the Urban Institute investigated the impact of the influx of participants on local labor markets where there might have been some unintended effects on workers for whom welfare recipients might be substitutes. Lerman and Ratcliffe find, "Changes in the Nation抯 welfare system apparently did not lead to deleterious consequences for the labor market position of either single mothers or less educated workers as a whole."
Richard Bavier of the Office of Management and Budget takes preliminary stock of the impact of welfare changes on those who leave the welfare rolls. Bavier concludes from the Census Bureau抯 Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) that most (about two-thirds) had at least some employment in the year post-exit, and many worked at least 50 weeks of the year, but that it is a much smaller group that worked full time and full year. The impact on incomes is also mixed梥ome welfare leavers realize income improvements, but others do not.
BLS economist William F. Snyders summarizes last year抯 developments in producer prices. Natural gas and petroleum-based products posted large price increases, thus driving higher rates of overall increase in producer price indexes than those that have prevailed in several previous years.
Raj K. Jain, a research economist at BLS, outlines research on the state-space model based approach to seasonal adjustment.
Growth, immigration and education
Following a growth rate of 2.6 percent per year in the 1970s, the rate of labor force growth fell to 1.6 percent per year in the 1980s and 1.2 percent per year in the 1990s. For 2000�, the annual rate is projected to be 1.0 percent and for 2015�, it is projected to be just 0.2 percent. According to those same projections, substantial parts of both net population growth and overall labor force growth will be the result of migration.
Among recent immigrants aged 25�, about 16 percent of workers have a master抯 or higher degree, while about 26 percent have not completed high school. In comparison, U.S.-born workers aged 25� are less than half as likely to have a master抯 or higher degree梐bout 7 percent attained that level of education. Another 7 percent of U.S.-born workers in this age group have not received a high school diploma.
These are important differences. In 2000, college graduates aged 25 and older earned nearly $400 more per week (at the median) than workers who stopped with a high school diploma. College graduates have experienced growth in real (inflation-adjusted) earnings since 1979. By contrast, the real earnings of workers who dropped out of high school have declined.
Information about these and other long-term labor market trends can be found in Working in the 21st Century, a chartbook produced by the Bureau of Labor Statistics for the Summit on the 21st Century Workforce sponsored by the U.S. Department of Labor.
Among poor consumer households, 61.8 percent contained only a single individual in 1999. In comparison, among other households in the expenditure distribution, only 20.4 percent consist of a single individual.
Also notable is that husband-and-wife type families comprise just over a tenth of households in the poor consumer group, but more than half of households in the rest of the expenditure distribution. Single-parent families account for 13.5 percent of the poor consumer households and 7.4 percent of the others.
For this analysis, "poor consumers" consist of households in the lowest decile of the expenditure distribution. "Average consumers" are represented by the averages for the remainder of the expenditure distribution. Full-time college students and homeowners who no longer have mortgage payments are excluded from this study. For additional information, see "Characteristics and spending patterns of consumer units in the lowest 10 percent of the expenditure distribution," Issues in Labor Statistics, Summary 01�.
Productivity in retail trade, as measured by output per hour, rose 5.2 percent in 1999. Output grew by 7.1 percent, while hours increased by 1.8 percent.
During the 1990� period, productivity in retail trade increased at an annual rate of 2.3 percent. This reflected output growth of 3.7 percent per year and hours growth of 1.4 percent per year. In each year of the 1990s, productivity in the retail sector either increased or was unchanged. The 1999 increase was the largest of the period.
The measure of retail trade productivity presented here was introduced by BLS this month. In addition, BLS now publishes productivity statistics for all of the industries in retail trade that are at the two-digit standard industrial classification (SIC) level. See "Productivity and Costs: Service-Producing and Mining Industries, 1990�" news release USDL 01�7.
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