OLMIS

by Charles Johnson
Published Dec-20-2011

The Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes annual estimates of the self-employed from the Current Population Survey (CPS), which covers roughly 60,000 households nationwide. The CPS is the regular monthly survey from which the national unemployment rate is derived.

The CPS estimates self-employment in agricultural and non-agricultural industries. Self-employment in agricultural industries tends to be a fairly steady metric, regularly accounting for just more than one-third of Oregon's total employment in agricultural industries yet accounting for only a small portion of the total self-employed. In 2009, the most recent year available, there were 22,000 self-employed individuals working in Oregon's agricultural industries.

Self-employment in non-agricultural industries tends to be more volatile, representing swings in the number of self-employed individuals in construction, professional and business services, and other industries. In the past decade, self-employment in Oregon's non-agricultural industries peaked in the year 2007 with 170,000 individuals self-employed (Table 1). Since then, the number of non-agricultural self-employed individuals in Oregon has dropped 12 percent to 149,000 in 2010. The total number of employed people in Oregon has declined only 3 percent during the same period, from 1.84 million in 2007 to 1.78 million in 2010.

In terms of employment, self-employed individuals in Oregon's non-agricultural industries fared worse during the recent recession than wage and salary workers in most industries. In 2010, Oregon's self-employed accounted for a smaller portion of all employment than at any other time in the past five years.

Because annual data for 2011 is not yet available, a 12-month moving average through June of each year can be used to compare more recent trends in self-employment in Oregon and the United States (Table 2). The number of non-agricultural self-employed individuals in Oregon dropped drastically between 2008 and 2009. However, self-employment levels have slowly climbed back over the past two years to 157,000 individuals. Non-agricultural self-employment levels across the nation have continued to decline since 2008.

An indexed 12-month moving average of non-agricultural self-employment levels for Oregon and the United States shows that self-employed workers in Oregon were impacted significantly by the recent recession - more so than their national brethren - a trend that seems to have been present during the recession of 2001 as well (Graph 1). A recent up-tick of self-employment in Oregon may indicate that this group of workers is seeing some recovery but it is too early to tell if this is the beginning of a new long-term trend or just a temporary blip. Regardless, there are 15,000 fewer non-agricultural self-employed individuals in Oregon today than there were before the recent recession.