Douglas County Economic Indicators - March 2022

The March 2022 Douglas County Economic Indicators are out now and also available at this qualityinfo.org link.

Employment saw a slight decrease in February 2022 of 40 jobs on a seasonally adjusted basis. Over the year, leisure and hospitality, other services and wholesale trade added the most jobs, offset by decreases in professional and business services; transportation, warehousing and utilities; and mining and logging.

The unemployment rate declined slightly to 4.7%, which is remarkably low in the historical perspective. With the exception of the all-time low reached in late 2019 (4.2%), we now have consistently lower unemployment than at any time in the last 30 years, including the lows before the Great Recession in 2008.

This month’s special graph uses location quotients (LQs) to show how economic specialization looks in our area. An LQ shows the magnitude of local employment in a sector in comparison with the nation, which I used to compare the three most and least concentrated large sectors in Douglas County.

Unsurprisingly, forestry, wood products and related industries make up specialized employment clusters in our area. The LQ for forestry and logging (58.1) means that those type of jobs make up more than 58 times of the proportion of jobs in our local mix than they do nationally. If we had the same mix locally as nationally, we’d only have 14 forestry and logging jobs, instead of over 800. By contrast, management, banking, and professional and technical services are a lot less concentrated in Douglas.

This month’s articles included:

Southwestern Oregon Job Vacancies Reach Record in 2021 on Quality Info
Youth Employment Trends in Oregon’s Leisure and Hospitality Sector on Quality Info
Oregon Usually Grows Faster from the Oregon Office of Economic Analysis

As always, the Indicators contain all the latest economic data on our area. If you have a data question or want to learn more about any of these topics, please don’t hesitate to reach out.

Henry L. Fields Workforce Analyst/Economist Serving Lane and Douglas counties Oregon Employment Department (541) 359-9178 | henry.l.fields@employ.oregon.gov