The U.S. Census Bureau released a report about the economic performance of the U.S. and the 50 states. The report shows that Wyoming’s economic performance outstands the national average as well as most of the states.
Robert Godby an Economics professor at UW said, “They are not much different from the past [reports] except that Wyoming’s income relative to the national average is rising that’s mainly because we are an energy economy.”
“The bottom line is, Wyoming’s income relatively speaking has been climbing relative to the national average or at least staying near the top. The reason for this is that our energy economy has kept relatively some high paying jobs here,” said Godby.
The unemployment rate in the U.S. for the current financial year is six percent. However Wyoming’s rate of unemployment is 3.5 percent, 2.5 percent lower than the nationwide unemployment rate.
“The short answer is, an energy boom has employed people with higher paying jobs, and kind of compressed or tightened up the income band, so there is actually more equality in Wyoming,” said Godby.
“If you lose your job here and you do not have the skills to get one of these energy jobs, or you do not want to, you typically go to somewhere else, where the economy is diversified,” said Godby.
Godby said that people often follow jobs, leaving the state when employment opportunities are no longer available.
Godby also said that the overall improvement in the U.S. unemployment rate is a sign of economic recovery.
“Basically, the economic recovery, six percent is still considered very high, the whole reason the unemployment rate fell so much is the economic recovery, it has been a pretty bad recession.”
“The recovery relatively speaking has been so slow, [the unemployment rate] was 10 percent back in 2010 it is six percent now, that’s a very long recovery. In Wyoming the recovery has been much quicker and again that’s for the reason of energy,” said Godby.
“When you have a financial crisis it takes quite bit longer to recover, on average about five years or six years to be fully recovered, some countries it lasts as long as 10 years after the financial crisis.” Godby said, “I would say it depends on many other factors, Europe is very slow right now, Europe is our largest trade partner, they are technically not in recession anymore it looks that their economy is worsening because of what is going on in Russia.” Godby also said that China is slowing down, thus the U.S. exports to china gone down; all these factors slow down the U.S. economic recovery.
Godby said that, in spite of these elements, the census report is a good sign that provides insight into just how bad the economy was.
“It shows improvement for the U.S. and Wyoming, however, it also shows, if you look over a long period of time, it shows how bad the decade form 2000 till 2010 was, wages, household incomes have not really improved at the rates we would normally see them improving.”
