Valley jobless rate bucks national trends
Staff/wire report
The Youngstown-Warren- Boardman metropolitan area bucked national trends last month when its unemployment rate rose, the U.S. Labor Department reported Wednesday.
Unemployment in the metro area increased to 14 percent last month, up from 13.7 percent in January and February.
Nationwide, however, unemployment rates fell or remained level in three-quarters of the 372 largest metropolitan areas, a sign that the economic recovery is widespread.
The jobless rate dropped in 69 percent of metro areas last month from February. It rose in 24 percent of large cities and remained the same in the rest.
That’s an improvement from February, when the unemployment rate decreased in 51 percent of metro areas and increased in one-third.
The report follows other recent encouraging news about jobs. Employers added 162,000 jobs in March, the government said earlier this month, the most significant gain in three years.
Still, the growth wasn’t enough to bring down the unemployment rate, which remained at 9.7 percent for the third-straight month.
The metro unemployment data isn’t seasonally adjusted and can be volatile from month to month. Some of the cities with sharp drops in unemployment last month recorded big increases in February. That could reflect the impact of February’s massive snowstorms, economists said.
The jobless rate dropped in only 41 metro areas in March compared with the previous year, while rising in 321. As recently as December, the unemployment rate fell in only one area compared with a year earlier.
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