Douglas A. McIntyre

24/7 Wall St.

If any proof of the unevenness of the economic recovery still has to be made, it is the wild disparity of unemployment from state to state. Based on U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) data for June, the jobless rate was under 4% in five states.

With the exception of Vermont, which had an unemployment rate of 3.5% in June, the states with extraordinary jobless figures are in the Great Plains, where an energy boom has helped the economy. Shale-rich North Dakota had a jobless rate of a mere 2.7% in June. Following it were Nebraska at 3.5%, Utah at 3.5% and South Dakota at 3.8%. The only state with 4% unemployment was Wyoming. While it is hard to prove a correlation, the states have small populations that are nothing close to being dense.

At the other end of the spectrum, employment remains very high in several formerly industrial states and others with poor populations. Rhode Island, stripped of its factory workers and people from the financial services industry, had an unemployment rate of 7.9% in June. So did extremely poor Mississippi, which has among the poorest populations in the country based on median household income. In another poor state, Kentucky, the jobless rate is 7.4%, and higher in the eastern counties that were once a center of coal production. Illinois, one of the most factory-rich northern states, had an unemployment rate of 7.1% in June. Michigan's was 7.5%. And Nevada, home to the greatest real estate collapse of the Great Recession, which gutted construction jobs, had a jobless rate of 7.7%

It is fair to say that if the U.S. economy is to have a normal, fully recovered jobless rate of 5% or better, these most troubled states have a very long way to go to contribute. There is nothing in their economic compositions that make that likely.

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