Weekly Economic Snapshot 5/22 - 5/26

Economic Facts for this Week

Joint Economic Committee Democrats released a report this week on the importance of investing in clean energy.

• Renewable energy now employs more than one in three Americans who work in electricity generation and fuel production employment.
• Employment in this sector is growing: jobs in wind electricity grew 32 percent in 2016 and jobs in solar electricity grew 18 percent.
• Clean energy yields a high return on investment: for a given amount of investment, renewable energy and energy efficiency investments generate nearly 3 times as many jobs as investment in fossil fuel energy.
• Fully transitioning to renewable energy would create 2 million additional full-time jobs in the United States.

Chart of the Week

The 2007-2009 U.S. recession hit rural economies particularly hard, where many workers are still struggling to recover. Not only have rural areas seen slower employment growth than urban areas, they also have experienced slower wage growth. Weekly wage growth before inflation in rural communities was only 3.8 percent over the past year, compared to growth of up to 5.5 percent in metropolitan communities. If wages for rural Americans had kept pace with those in metropolitan wages, the average rural worker would have earned an extra $300 last year. For more, see the Joint Economic Committee Democrats’ recent report on the economic challenges facing people in rural America.

ICYMI

• Fast-growing, high-profit “superstar” firms appear to be consolidating more power over markets in a smaller number of firms, while also shrinking the labor share of income.
• TrumpCare would be a disaster for people in rural communities: 12 of the 15 states that would see the largest increase in total out-of-pocket costs have disproportionately large rural populations in the individual marketplace, and almost 1.7 million rural residents receive health coverage from Medicaid expansion, which TrumpCare would eliminate.
• Much recent research on public debt and economic growth misses the mark by failing to account for a variety of statistical biases in identifying causality and covering only small samples of countries, economists at the University of Massachusetts find. A more robust accounting finds no evidence for a causal relationship between debt and growth, but rather that slow growth likely leads to higher levels of public debt. 

Coming This Week

• Friday 8:30am: Gross Domestic Product, 1^st quarter 2017 (second estimate) - https://www.bea.gov/newsreleases/national/gdp/gdpnewsrelease.htm