Payroll and GDP

Posted on Monday, December 7, 2009

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Calculated Risk looks at the strong relationship between Employment and Real GDP:

This shows that real GDP has to grow at a sustained rate of about 1% just to keep the net change in payroll jobs at zero.

A 3% increase in real GDP (over a year) would lead to about a 1.5% increase in payroll employment. With approximately 131 million payroll jobs, a 1.5% increase in payroll employment would be just under 2 million jobs over the next year - and the unemployment rate would probably remain close to 10%.

The following chart summarizes a table presented in the post, which is a quick and dirty way to estimate real GDP growth rates over the next 12 months time under a variety of employment scenarios (and what the unemployment rate would be at those levels).