Valley’s January unemployment rate down 1 percent

YOUNGSTOWN — Local unemployment in the Mahoning Valley dropped by 1 percent year over year to 7.7 percent in January 2017.

The unemployment rate in January 2016 was 8.8 percent.

The number of unemployed dropped from 21,600 down to 18,400, but the number of employed also dropped from 224,800 to 222,200. The civilian labor force, or the sum of the employed and unemployed, went from 246,000 to 241,000.