by Calculated Risk on 2/11/2010 11:03:00 AM

Here is the Economic Forecast from the Economic Report of the President. The last column is average payroll jobs per month per year.

Click on table for larger image in new window.

The forecast is for an average of 95,000 non-farm payroll jobs to be added per month in 2010, with the unemployment rate averaging 10.0% and real GDP growth of 3.0%.

Although there is no way to directly calculate the unemployment rate based on payroll jobs growth - because the data is from different surveys and depends on the number of people in the work force and other factors - there is a fairly strong relationship between payroll jobs and the unemployment rate.

Based on my estimates, it would seem that 3.0% real GDP growth in 2010 would lead to about 160,000 payroll jobs per month and a slight decline in the unemployment rate.

Conversely, 95,000 jobs per month is probably consistent with real GDP growth at just over 2%, and an increase in the unemployment rate to over 10%. Based on their forecast for real GDP growth of 3%, it appears they are being conservative on their jobs forecast.