Florida’s unemployment rate rose from a seasonally adjusted 6.2 percent in July to 6.3 percent in August, the Florida Department of Economic Opportunity reported last week, continuing a generally flat trend since the beginning of 2014.
However, the flattening of the jobless rate is an encouraging sign for the state, according to the latest economic overview report by the Florida Legislature’s Office of Economic and Demographic Research.
The state’s unemployment rate has hovered between 6.2 percent and 6.3 percent all year, but that’s due to an increase in the labor market participation rate that began in January “as improving job prospects began to encourage people to rejoin or enter the labor force,” the report said.
When people are not actively looking for work, they are considered to be not participating in the labor market and are not counted as unemployed.
“May marked the fifth consecutive month of increases in the participation rate, and June was not statistically different at 60.7 percent, a return to the December 2011 level,” said the report, which was issued a day before the latest unemployment figures were announced.
That “positive shift” has kept the unemployment rate flat this year, “but the reason is actually a signal of a strongly improving economy,” it said.
The news is not all positive in the labor market. The report said that Florida is still 257,400 jobs short of the state’s employment level at its most recent peak.
“Florida’s prime working-age population (aged 25 to 54) is forecast to add about 4,100 people per month, so the hole is deeper than it looks,” it said. “It would take the creation of about 750,000 jobs for the same percentage of the total population to be working as was the case at the peak.”
Floridian’s wages, at 87.6 percent of the U.S. average in 2013, are also not keeping up with the rest of the country.
“Although Florida’s wage level actually increased over the prior year, the U.S. annual average wage increased more,” the report said.
Other economic data also show that Florida’s economy is still struggling to get back to its pre-recession level.
Building permits, an indicator of new construction activity, rose 36.6 percent in 2012 and 33.4 percent in 2013, but data for 2014 show that activity has slowed.
“Year-to-date activity through July is running below last year for the same period, although single-family data essentially equals last year’s data at that same point in time,” the report said.
The level of home sales in the state was at 93 percent of its 2005 peak through July, which was below the 94.1 percent level for 2013.
Florida still has the highest foreclosure rate for any U.S. state, with nine of the top 10 metropolitan area foreclosure rates in the nation in the first half of 2014 remaining in Florida. The highest foreclosure rate is in the Miami-Fort Lauderdale-Pompano Beach market.
The Jacksonville metropolitan area, which has ranked at or near the top of the foreclosure rankings at times in recent years, ranked ninth in the first six months this year, the report said.
The home ownership rate in Florida continues to decline, from 66.1 percent in 2013 to 65.3 percent in the second quarter this year.
“If this becomes the final percentage for the year, it will be the lowest level seen since 1990,” the report said.
The research office concludes that while the Florida economy continues to improve, it still has a long way to go.
“By the close of the 2013-14 fiscal year, several key measures of the Florida economy had returned to or surpassed their prior peaks,” the report said.
Personal income and tourism counts are two measures that have surpassed previous peaks, but construction activity is not expected to return to its peak levels until at least 2022.
“The drags are more persistent than past events, and it will take a few more years to climb completely out of the hole left by the recession. In the various forecasts, normalcy has been largely achieved by fiscal year 2016-17,” the report said.
(904) 356-2466