O.C.’s Jobless Rate Up Nearly One Full Point : Unemployment: Figure jumps from 4.4% to 5.3% in month. Seasonal and recession-related layoffs blamed.

Fueled by seasonal and recession-related layoffs, Orange County’s unemployment rate jumped nearly a full percentage point in January to 5.3% from December’s 4.4%.

A total of 74,100 county residents were unemployed during the month, up from 64,600 at the beginning of 1991, when the unemployment rate was 4.7%.

The county’s January jobless rate was the second highest of the current recession, just slightly lower than the 5.4% recorded last June and July, and also is the second highest in the county since layoffs from the last recession began tapering off in February, 1984.

A separate state report on jobs at businesses in Orange County showed that 21,000 non-agricultural jobs were eliminated during the first month of 1992.

About half the job losses were seasonal--post-holiday layoffs in retailing and weather-related layoffs in construction. But the rest, including several thousand retail posts, 1,900 manufacturing jobs and more than 5,000 jobs trimmed from various service sector employers’ payrolls, appear to be directly related to the effects of the recession.

Orange County’s January jobless rate remained well below the state average of 7.7% and the Los Angeles County rate of 8.7%.

The local numbers spawned mildly conflicting analyses from local economists who tend to agree that the employment scene will improve in the last half of 1992 but have differing opinions about the implications of January’s unexpectedly high jobless rate.

“It’s a little alarming because we are losing more jobs for the month than just what is seasonally expected,” said Esmael Adibi, director of the Chapman University Center of Economic Research.

Still, he said, Chapman economists are sticking to their prediction that gains in the last half of the year will erase early job losses and result in a net gain of about 0.75%, or 9,000 jobs for the year.

But Robert Valetta, an economic forecaster at UC Irvine, said that while January’s jobless rate was slightly higher than the 5% he and fellow UCI economist David Brownstone had predicted, it was not out of line with their expectations for the year--which call for a 0.6% decline in county-based employment by next January, or a drop of about 7,500 jobs.

The increase from December “is consistent with what typically happens as a recession ends and economic recovery is just getting under way,” Valetta said. “That’s when you have the biggest unemployment” because employers tend to postpone layoffs as long as possible, with the bulk of them occurring at the tail end rather than the middle of a recession, he said.

And Anil Puri, associate director of Cal State Fullerton’s Institute for Economic and Environmental Studies, said he is “just a little skeptical that this signals the end of recession. The big January decline in the labor force in Orange County tells me that there is still a lot of sluggishness in the economy.”

Still, Puri also said he expects Orange County employers to begin adding jobs to their payrolls in the second half of the year.

Puri was co-author of a report, released last month, that found that while the overall job loss in this recession is much lower than the recession of 1981-82, the relative impact on employment this time has been far greater in Orange County than other counties in the state with higher jobless rates.

That is because in the current recession, job losses at businesses in the county have occurred in almost all employment categories, while in the last recession they were concentrated in construction and manufacturing--the goods-producing segments of the economy.

“In the last recession, gains in the services, like retailing and business services, made up for losses in the goods sector,” Puri said. “But that hasn’t happened this time.”

Of the 21,000 jobs Orange County employers slashed from their payrolls in January, only 4,400 came out of the manufacturing and construction industries. The rest, 16,600 jobs, were pared from service industries, which in past years has been where most of the county’s job growth has occurred.

Unemployment Rate in Orange County Joblessness in Orange County posted a big jump in January, in part because of seasonal layoffs of holiday retail workers and in part because of the continuing impact of the recession. January’s 5.3% unemployment rate was the highest since July. Unemployment Rate 1991 January: 4.7% 1992 January: 5.3% Number of Jobs In thousands 1991 January: 1,209.2 1992 January: 1,192.1 Source: California Employment Development Department