January 2021 Regional Economic Indicators

Good morning.  Below is the University of Oregon Regional Economic Indexes for January 2021. The release date is April 6, 2021. We thank KeyBank for their generous support of this project.

Full report here with charts!

Oregon Regional Economic Indicators

Regional measures of economic activity were mixed in January. Highlights of the report include:

• The Portland and Eugene-Springfield regions were both negative, indicating below normal growth. Remaining regions were all positive. The moving average measures of activity, which smooth out the monthly variation, indicate that as of January the Portland and Eugene-Springfield regions were lagging the recovery in other regions.
• There were a number of idiosyncratic components that drove individual regional measures this month. For instance, the labor force metric made a large negative contribution to the Eugene-Springfield measure but a large positive contribution to the Salem measure.
• Likewise, construction employment, which can be volatile, had an outsized negative impact on the Portland measure. A rebound in lodging revenue supported the Central Oregon measure.
• Still, there were some common threads. As the unemployment rate has fallen, this component now makes a nearly negative contribution to the measures. Residential home sales made a positive contribution across the measures, while new housing permits was nearly neutral (note that the strong pace of sales coupled with restricted supply helps put upward pressure on pricing).