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Iowa has biggest bounce-back in unemployment rate of 2020, study says

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According to a study from the website WalletHub.com, the state of Iowa’s unemployment rate has bounced back in 2020 better than any other state in the United States, taking into account data from October 2019 to October 2020.

Iowa’s unemployment rate dropped to 3.0 percent in the month of October — the third-lowest in the country behind Nebraska (2.7 percent) and Vermont (2.4).

This number, provided by the state workforce development each month, does not include members of the workforce who stopped looking for jobs.

COVID-19 has resulted in a big hit to the national economy and the nationwide unemployment rate, and some states have been hit harder than others. However, since January, Iowa has had the second-best recovery in unemployment insurance with the rate dropping 23.6 percent since January, according to the study. Only Vermont has made a better recovery on a monthly scale in that time.

This study looks at the monthly unemployment numbers of each state, and WalletHub writer Adam McCann provided an explanation below the study of how the numbers were calculated. All statistics were gathered from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and U.S. Department of Labor.

“In the first category, we compared the change in unemployment for the latest month for which we had data (October 2020) to both October 2019 and January 2020, in order to show the impact since last year and since the beginning of this year,” McCann said. “We also compared not seasonally adjusted continued claims in October 2020 to October 2019. In the second category, we looked at the state’s overall unemployment rate. We then used the average of those categories to rank-order the states.”

Behind Iowa in the top-five of recoveries include Nebraska, Vermont, Missouri and South Dakota.

Iowa is also fifth in a different study by WalletHub ranking the states whose weekly unemployment claims have recovered the most since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic’s impact in the United States.

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