MacroScope

The U.S. workforce has been shrinking rapidly in recent years, but a new report from UniCredit highlights just how massive the effect of this trend really is. Economist Harm Bandholz says it amounts to a gaping 3.6 percentage points of U.S. unemployment.

That means the U.S. jobless rate, which dropped to 7.7 percent in February, would actually be around 11.3 percent without the decline in labor force participation. This would put American unemployment a lot closer to the euro zone’s recently reported record high rate of 11.9 percent.

The labor force participation fell further in February to 63.5, matching an August reading that was the lowest since 1981.

Of that 3.6 percentage point decline attributable to a shrinking workforce, a little over half is due to long-term demographic factors, Bandholz’s models surmise. But the remainder represents direct damage to the U.S. job market from the Great Recession. While labor force participation has historically moved lower during economic slumps, Bandholz says the recent drop has been particularly abrupt.

“What is unprecedented since World War II, however, is the extent of the current cyclical decline,” he writes.

After a string of very weak figures in the second quarter, the July employment figures prompted a collective sigh of relief that the U.S. economy was at least not sinking into recession. That doesn’t mean the news was particularly comforting. U.S. employers created a net 163,000 new jobs last month, far above the Reuters poll consensus of 100,000. Still, the jobless rate rose to 8.3 percent.

Steve Blitz of ITG Investment Research explains why the underlying components of the payrolls survey offered little cause for enthusiasm:

The headline is good but the details do nothing to dissuade the notion that economic activity remains soft. There is, in effect, no sign in the details economic activity has accelerated from June’s pace when a downward revised 73,000 private sector jobs were added. Hours worked remain the same and overtime at manufacturing firms fell. The diffusion index (percentage of firms adding workers plus one-half of the percentage with unchanged payrolls) dropped in July to 56.4 from 56.8 in June, 61.3 in May, and 62.2 in July of last year. The civilian labor force dropped by 150,000 and the broad U-6 measure of unemployment rose to 15.0% — reversing all the gains made in 2012.