State and Local Government Employment and Payroll Data in Missouri Follows National Trend

This month, the Cato Institute published a bulletin titled “Employee Compensation in State and Local Governments,” in which the author examines state and local compensation costs:

State and local governments face large budget deficits as revenues have stagnated and spending has remained at high levels.

I used the Show-Me Institute’s newest web tool, Interactive Database for Economic Analysis by State, to isolate state and local government employment and payroll data from U.S. Census. Next, I used this inflation calculator from the Bureau of Labor Statistics to adjust the data to 2008 dollars.

The following graph shows this information for all states for 2008. Wyoming has the highest number of public employees per capita, at 927, and Nevada had the lowest, at 437. Missouri was in the middle — it was ranked the 29th highest (alternatively, the 23rd lowest) in this category:

The data for Missouri reflect the general growth in the size of government described in the Cato bulletin. From 1993 to 2008, the number of total employees grew by 29 percent, the number of full-time employees grew by 27 percent, and the number of part-time employees grew by 44 percent.

The data also show that payroll is growing at a faster rate than the number of employees. From 1993 to 2008, after adjusting for inflation, total monthly payroll grew by31 percent, full-time payroll grew by 30 percent, and part-time payroll grew by 55 percent:

Given this rate of growth in monthly payroll and number of employees, Missouri’s present budgetary problems are no surprise to me.