Good morning. Below is the University of Oregon Regional Economic Indexes for January 2019. The release date is April 10, 2019. We thank KeyBank for their generous support of this project.
Strong employment gains boosted regional measures in the first month of 2019. Highlights of this month’s report include:
- For all regions covered by this report, the raw and moving average measures (which smooth monthly volatility) were above zero, indicating an above-trend pace of activity (trend activity differs across regions).
- The contribution from the housing market, while generally still positive in most areas, became less pronounced in the final months of 2018 and into 2019.
- Residential housing components jointly made a neutral contribution in the Portland region. In other regions, the contributions attributed to new building permits ranged from modestly negative in Eugene to modestly positive in Salem. Outside of Portland, housing sales, while slower, still contributed positively to the measure.
- Employment and broad labor market components indicate the jobs market remained solid. A jump in lodging revenue supported a substantial contribution to the Central Oregon measure, but this appears to largely reflect noise in the data; the series has been generally moving sideways since 2017.
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