January 28, 2013. A minimum wage increase included in Governor Cuomo’s budget proposal, released last Tuesday, would raise the paychecks of over 1.5 million low-paid New Yorkers, according to a new report from the Fiscal Policy Institute and the National Employment Law Project. The Governor’s proposal would raise the state’s minimum wage from $7.25 to $8.75 per hour on July 1, 2013, and the increased wages would generate more than $1 billion in new consumer spending, supporting the creation… (read more)

December 20, 2012. Prepared by FPI  for the  Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce, the latest issue of the BLMR looks at Brooklyn’s food chain including specialty food manufacturing, restaurants, and gourmet food stores. The report finds that when you look at the entire Brooklyn food chain—starting with food manufacturing and wholesale distribution, and including grocery stores, specialty food stores, restaurants and coffee shops—nearly 59,000 people are employed in 7,800 businesses. Thus, the food chain accounts for 16 percent of the 49,000 businesses… (read more)

December 7, 2012. Recognition of the crucial role played by front line workforce development workers led Workforce Professionals Training Institute and the Fiscal Policy Institute to undertake a study of this profession in New York City. The objective was to analyze the current state of these jobs and the workers who hold them, with a particular emphasis on issues such as job satisfaction, training, and advancement opportunities, for the purpose of improving the quality of outcomes that workforce professionals are… (read more)

November 15, 2012. A new report from the Fiscal Policy Institute shows that various income measures all point toward the same conclusions:  In recent years, polarization has intensified; and New York has been one of the national leaders in this undesirable trend. The top one percent share of income dipped during the recession, but has started to rise again in the recovery. Further, no state is more polarized than New York and no large city is more polarized than New York City, (using… (read more)

November 2, 2012. This piece on the economic impact of superstorm Sandy was written by James Parrott for Quartz, the new international business news site (Qz.com) published by The Atlantic Monthly.

Since the October jobs report released today reflects employment conditions as of the second week of the month, it doesn’t tell us anything about the impact of Hurricane Sandy, the most devastating storm to hit the New York metro area in decades. What can we expect to see… (read more)

November 1, 2012. For the past year, the conflicting trends exhibited by employment and unemployment data for NYS (and its major sub-areas including NYC) have confused analysts and have made it unusually difficult to get a clear reading on the state’s economy. Payroll employment has generally shown a rising trend, more or less in line with the national job recovery over the past two years. However, in New York State, unemployment has also been rising, and by more than can… (read more)

September 28, 2012. In testimony submitted to the New York City Council Committees on Economic Development, Higher Education and Technology, James A. Parrott, FPI’s Deputy Director and Chief Economist, concluded that the “Applied Sciences NYC Initiative” represents an important step in diversifying the New York City economy.  According to Parrott, this initiative, which includes the plan for the development by Cornell and Technion Universities of a new engineering campus on Roosevelt Island, as well as projects involving… (read more)

September 27, 2012. The latest data from the Census Bureau on poverty and incomes in 2011 clearly show that New York City has a long way to go to make up for the erosion in living standards caused by the Great Recession of 2008-09. Since the start of the recession, 200,000 more city residents have fallen into poverty, bringing the total to 1.7 million out of a population of 8.1 million.  For 2011, the federal poverty threshold for a 3-person… (read more)

September 21, 2012. Data released by the Census Bureau yesterday casts additional light on New York’s high poverty rate and its extreme income inequality. The poverty situation is particularly dire in the Upstate cities and among children. When those two factors are looked at together, alarm bells should be going off in policymakers’ offices.

More than half the children in Rochester and Syracuse lived in poverty in 2011 and Buffalo (46.8%), Schenectady (50.8%) and Albany (37%) were not far behind. See Table 1… (read more)

September 12, 2012. One piece of good news from the Census Bureau data released today is an increase in the percentage of people with health insurance in New York State and across the country in 2011.

The share of New Yorkers without health insurance dropped last year, according to preliminary state Census Bureau figures. Roughly one in eight New Yorkers did not have health insurance coverage in 2011, a decrease of three percent from 2010. A similar, though less pronounced,… (read more)