Total nonagricultural employment is the measure of the economy’s job count most commonly used by economists. Employment is estimated from the Current Employment Survey, which is administered to private, non-farm businesses and government offices and includes questions on the number of jobs, wages, hours, and other measures of work force activity. Significantly, this employment figure is a measure of the number jobs, not the number of people who have a job. If a person holds two jobs both are counted. People who are self-employed are not counted and full-time jobs are not differentiated from part-time jobs. These nuances are important to remember when analyzing this employment data.

Employment changes reflect the business cycle, with the job count generally increasing during the expansionary segment of an economic cycle, and contracting in the recessionary period. This chart displays New England’s employment compared to that of the United States, both indexed to January 2000 levels. The region’s employment path was similar to that of the U.S. throughout most of the 1970s and 1980s. In the late 1980s, however, employment levels dropped sooner and more steeply in New England than in the United States, as the region suffered more than the rest of the country during the recession of the early 1990s. Employment in New England has not caught up with national employment since the 2001 recession, making the region’s rate of employment growth slower than that of the nation for the last decade.