From an Attican Hollow: Unemployment in Ohio's Counties

Ani Ruhil

Unemployment in Ohio’s Counties

It has been a while since I created a new post and although there have been a few in the pipeline, I cannot find the peace of mind to sit down and work through them to create something worthwhile. To assuage the feeling of falling behind, here is a quick post tracking unemployment rates in our counties. The data are from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Preview image is by Dorothea Lange, courtesy The New York Public Library and Unsplash.

This post was originally written on 2020-07-17

The January 2021 data are provisional estimates and should be discounted for good reason. In January 2021, Noble (8.5%), Monroe and Ottawa (8.6% each), Erie and Morgan (8.1% each) had the highest unemployment rates. The five counties with the lowest unemployment rates were Holmes (3.1%), Mercer (3.4%), Putnam (3.8%), Union (3.9%), and Auglaize (4.0%).

As you look at the chart below, please keep in mind that the y-axis has been allowed to vary by county. If you compare two or more counties, please focus on their respective y-axis values.

Here is the code:

library(tidyverse)
read_delim("https://www.bls.gov/web/metro/laucntycur14.txt", 
    "|", escape_double = FALSE, col_names = FALSE, 
    trim_ws = TRUE, skip = 6) -> laucnty

colnames(laucnty) = c("laus_area_code", "statefips", "countyfips",
                      "areaname", "period", "civ_laborforce", "employed",
                      "unemployed", "urate")

laucnty %>%
  filter(statefips == "39") %>%
  mutate(
    county = gsub(" County, OH", "", areaname),
    date = paste("01", period, sep = ""),
    date = lubridate::dmy(date),
    rate = urate/100
    ) %>%
  ggplot() +
  geom_smooth(aes(x = date, y = rate)) +
  scale_x_date(date_labels = "%m/%y", date_breaks = "4 months") +  
  scale_y_continuous(labels = scales::percent) +
  expand_limits(y = 0) +
  facet_wrap(~ county, scales = "free_y", ncol = 8) +
  themeani::theme_ani_nunito() +
  theme(
    strip.text = element_text(size = 14, face = "bold"),
    plot.title = element_text(size = 28, face = "bold"),
    plot.subtitle = element_text(size = 24, face = "bold"),
    plot.caption = element_text(size = 24, face = "italic"),
    axis.title = element_text(size = 24, face = "bold")
    ) +
  labs(
    title = "Ohio Counties' Unemployment Rate",
    subtitle = "(April 2019 through August 2020)",
    caption = "@aruhil",
    x = "Month and Year",
    y = "% Unemployed"
    )

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Citation

For attribution, please cite this work as

Ruhil (2020, Dec. 18). From an Attican Hollow: Unemployment in Ohio's Counties. Retrieved from https://aniruhil.org/posts/2020-12-18-unemployment-in-ohios-counties/

BibTeX citation

@misc{ruhil2020unemployment,
  author = {Ruhil, Ani},
  title = {From an Attican Hollow: Unemployment in Ohio's Counties},
  url = {https://aniruhil.org/posts/2020-12-18-unemployment-in-ohios-counties/},
  year = {2020}
}