Hannah G. Shell is a senior research associate at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.
Residual seasonality in gross domestic product can make it difficult for policymakers to know whether weak first-quarter GDP growth is due to an actual downturn or a reported number that is understated.
Jobs in the St. Louis Fed’s District face a higher risk of automation than do jobs nation-wide. Smaller MSAs in the District will face bigger impact.
See why jobs in the District, nation are increasingly becoming high-skill or low-skill. The decline of middle-skill jobs may be widening income inequality.
Find out why accurate reporting by China on its economy is important and how doubting outsiders are stepping in with their own measurements.
Before there is discussion on what can and should be done about income inequality, interested parties should understand the different methods that can be used to measure the gap. Knowing when the gap has been particularly wide or narrow over the past 50 or so years would also be helpful.
As in the nation, the Eighth Federal Reserve District’s main trading partners are Canada, Mexico, China and the European Union. What is imported and exported, however, can vary significantly.
The Eighth District added about 150,000 jobs from 2010 to 2013, almost 75 percent of them in low-paying industries. Such jobs are growing at a faster rate than those in high-paying industries, the opposite of what is happening on the national level.
Income inequality has increased in the St. Louis Fed's District over the past 30 years, although at a slower pace than in the nation as a whole. In both areas, the inequality is increasing primarily between the top-income earners and the middle-income earners.
