LIMA — Allen County’s jobless rate fell 0.3 percentage points from July to August as 300 people were hired or returned to their previous jobs, including one-third of whom who had previously dropped out of the labor force, according to preliminary employment estimates from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, which released its county-level jobless data for August on Tuesday.
The jobless rate now stands at 8.4%, a considerable improvement from the peak of the crisis in April, when Allen County’s official unemployment rate was 20.5%.
But the size of the county’s labor force has not fully recovered since April — the highest it has been since August 2017 — a problem that will challenge Allen County’s economic recovery and which potentially undercounts the jobless rate by excluding long-term unemployment, even as there were 4,000 people in Allen County classified as unemployed in August.
Another sign of a stalling recovery: Ohio’s jobless rate fell 0.1 percentage points to 8.9% from a revised 9.0% in July, as the state added 37,700 private-sector jobs and 7,800 government jobs in August.
This, even as the nation’s jobless rate improved to 8.4%, down 1.8 percentage points from July.
Holmes County has emerged as the leading county in Ohio with a jobless rate of 4.1% in August, while Cuyahoga County claimed the highest at 11.6% unemployment.
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