Economics

New Mexico’s Breaking the Job Growth Slump

By Emily Esterson, 3-31-06

We've been waiting for years for this news: New Mexico's jobless rate just hit its lowest level since April 2001. The unemployed equaled 4.8 percent of the population in February, while the state added a record 22,000 jobs. The national unemployment rate was also 4.8 percent for February.

As it's been for the past year, the mining and construction industries have been driving job growth in New Mexico. With each uptick at the gas pump, an oil company considers drilling a new well, and adding a few jobs along with it.

The laggards in the job growth category have traditionally been those jobs that we want most: manufacturing and information technology. But in a surprising twist, the Albuquerque area's manufacturing sector came in third behind construction and health care employment as the fastest growing sector: proof, perhaps, that New Mexico's economic development programs and industry attraction efforts have been paying off?

In any case, New Mexico has never quite seen the booms and busts of other states that rose and fell with industry trends. Instead, we've held steady at about 1.8 to 2.1 percent job growth for the past six or seven years. Perhaps we're coming out of the slow and stagnant slump.

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