The latest employment numbers bring the yearly growth rate up to 3.7%. April’s 4.2% employment growth combined with leading index data has led the Texas Employment Forecast to conclude that job growth will be about 3.6% for 2018.
Dallas Fed senior economist and assistant vice president Keith R. Phillips elaborated on the significance of these latest numbers, saying:
“Texas job growth picked up in April, and year to date the state has added 151,200 jobs—the most over a four-month period since the end of 2014. Combined with continued growth in the leading index, this makes it very likely that job growth will be strong in the second half of 2018.”
The Dallas Fed fine-tuned payroll employment estimates from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) by utilizing a two-step technique for seasonal adjustment and integrating into the data preliminary benchmarks. The benefits of higher employment numbers spread across an area's economy; for example, the demand for everything from business card printing to gasoline goes up as well.
The Dallas Fed also seasonally adjusts the BLS’s unemployment rates for the Texas metropolitan areas, which according to the latest numbers have dropped in four out of the state’s nine major metro areas.