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Ohio's January Jobless Rate Falls to the Lowest Level in Nearly a Year

photo of Hannah Halbert
POLICY MATTERS OHIO

The state’s jobless rate has fallen to 4.7 percent, its lowest level since last March. Statehouse correspondent Karen Kasler reports.

January’s unemployment rate went down 0.2 of a point from December’s revised rate of 4.9 percent.Hannah Halbert from the progressive think tank Policy Matters Ohio says that’s good news – with a caveat.

“It certainly suggests that the Ohio economy is starting to edge closer to full employment. But when we look at the numbers going into that rate, we see that there’s a lot of slack and a lot of work that still needs to be done.”

Halbert says the state’s labor force is still more than 3.5 percent smaller than it was when the recession started a decade ago. And the state’s jobless rate is still more than a half a point higher than the national unemployment rate of 4.1 percent.

Karen is a lifelong Ohioan who has served as news director at WCBE-FM, assignment editor/overnight anchor at WBNS-TV, and afternoon drive anchor/assignment editor in WTAM-AM in Cleveland. In addition to her daily reporting for Ohio’s public radio stations, she’s reported for NPR, the BBC, ABC Radio News and other news outlets. She hosts and produces the Statehouse News Bureau’s weekly TV show “The State of Ohio”, which airs on PBS stations statewide. She’s also a frequent guest on WOSU TV’s “Columbus on the Record”, a regular panelist on “The Sound of Ideas” on ideastream in Cleveland, appeared on the inaugural edition of “Face the State” on WBNS-TV and occasionally reports for “PBS Newshour”. She’s often called to moderate debates, including the Columbus Metropolitan Club’s Issue 3/legal marijuana debate and its pre-primary mayoral debate, and the City Club of Cleveland’s US Senate debate in 2012.