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News from EPI › Employment during the economic recovery

Press Releases • July 6, 2011

For Immediate Release: Wednesday, July 6, 2011
Contact: Phoebe Silag or Karen Conner, news@epi.org 202-775-8810

Employment during the economic recovery

Two years after the official end of the Great Recession, the continued loss of public-sector jobs is an obstacle to reaching pre-recession employment levels. Today’s Snapshot shows that this decline in government employment is a historic anomaly; public-sector employment actually increased in the two years after official recoveries began in 10 of 11 post-World War II business cycles. The lone exception was in the early 1980s when the economy experienced a double-dip recession.

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