On May 22nd 2020, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics released the Seasonally Adjusted Unemployment rates for each of the fifty U.S. states but “Due to the effects of the pandemic and efforts to contain the virus, Puerto Rico was not able to conduct normal data collection for its household survey in March or April 2020.”
According to the May 8th BLS data, April’s overall U.S. Seasonally Adjusted Unemployment Rate was 14.7% in today’s release we can see that some states had significantly higher rates with Nevada having 28.2% Unemployment, and Hawaii and Michigan having 22.3% and 22.7% unemployment respectively. At first blush, we might consider Hawaii and Nevada as understandable due to their high reliance on tourism but Michigan doesn’t have high tourism. And if high tourism is the cause for Hawaii and Nevada why does a high tourism state like Florida have “only” 12.9% unemployment?
By looking at the map we can see the high unemployment states are clustered in the Northeast and run down to Louisiana (which got hit with a double whammy of both the Coronavirus and falling oil prices). Other hard-hit areas are the West Coast and Hawaii.
State Unemployment Levels
The following table provides [Read more…] about Unemployment Rate by State April 2020