Jan. 28 (Bloomberg) — Payrolls increased in 30 states in December, and the jobless rate dropped in 39, showing the job market was mending across the world's largest economy.
Texas led the nation with a 17,600 gain in payrolls, followed by Florida with 14,100 more jobs, figures from the Labor Department showed today in Washington. Louisiana showed the biggest drop in joblessness last month, while North Carolina showed the largest decrease in 2013.
Advances in employment will help spur sustained consumer spending, which accounts for almost 70 percent of the economy. Federal Reserve policy makers, set to meet today and tomorrow, trimmed their monthly bond buying to $75 billion from $85 billion in part due to improvement in the labor market.
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"We're seeing job growth across the country and it's more even growth," Scott Anderson, chief economist at Bank of the West in San Francisco, said before the report. "The gains will continue in 2014."
State and local employment data are derived independently from the national statistics, which are typically released on the first Friday of every month. The state figures are subject to larger sampling errors because they come from smaller surveys, thus making the national figures more reliable, according to the government's Bureau of Labor Statistics.
The swathe of improvement may help dispel concern about the employment rebound after data released earlier this month showed payrolls in December grew at the slowest pace since January 2011, in part reflecting bad weather.
Employers added 74,000 workers after a revised 241,000 gain in November that was larger than initially estimated, the Labor Department reported on Jan. 10. The U.S. jobless rate dropped to 6.7 percent, the lowest level since October 2008, as more people left the labor force.
Today's figures showed the unemployment rate in Louisiana declined by 0.6 percentage point in December from the prior month to 5.7 percent. The jobless rate in North Carolina was 6.9 percent in December, down 2.5 percentage points from the same month a year earlier.
Rhode Island was the state with the highest jobless rate in the country, at 9.1 percent. Nevada was second at 8.8 percent and Illinois was third at 8.6 percent.
North Dakota had the lowest unemployment in the nation, holding at 2.6 percent.
The labor market may get a boost as the expansion strengthens across the country.
Nearly every U.S. city's economy is projected to grow this year, including areas that struggled to rebound from the recession, according to data released this month by the U.S. Conference of Mayors. All but seven of 363 metropolitan areas will see economic gains, said the report prepared by IHS Global Insight, an economic analysis company. That would mark a shift from 2013, when about one-fourth contracted.
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