The American economy may be the world’s biggest, but when it comes to job creation since the recession hit at the end of 2007, it is far from a leader.
Indeed, contrary to the widespread view that the United States is an island of relative prosperity in a global sea of economic torpor, employment in several other nations has bounced back more quickly, according to a new analysis by the Bureau of Labor Statistics…
A big part of the problem, economists say, is just how big a hole the American economy fell into in the first place. Not only did the global economic downturn begin here, it also enveloped the housing market and the banking system, sectors that were largely spared in many other countries.
“Canada didn’t really have much of a housing bust,” Mr. Katz said.
A new paper by two economists from the University of British Columbia, Florian Hoffmann and Thomas Lemieux, concludes that over half of the recent variation in employment trends between the United States on the one hand, and Canada and Germany on the other, can be attributed to the construction sector.
Although the construction field gained 69,000 jobs in the first five months of 2013, with 5.8 million jobs in May, that was still nearly two million fewer jobs than in 2007, according to the Labor Department…
Chosen excerpts by Job Market Monitor
via Employment in U.S. Lags Where It Was in 2007 – NYTimes.com.
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