Today (September 19, 2024), the Australian Bureau of Statistics released the latest – Labour Force, Australia – for August 2024, which shows that the labour outlook labour outlook might be about to change despite the on-going employment growth.. Employment growth was biased towards part-time jobs as full-time employment fell. underemployment rose. The unemployment rate was…
Labour Force
Today (August 15, 2024), the Australian Bureau of Statistics released the latest – Labour Force, Australia – for July 2024, which shows that the labour outlook continues to remain positive. Employment growth was relatively strong and biased towards full-time jobs. The unemployment rose by 0.1 point to 4.2 per cent but only because the participation…
The financial markets around the world have over the last week demonstrated, once again, that they are subject to wild swings in irrationality despite mainstream economists holding out the idea that these sorts of transactions exhibit pure rationality. Some of the capital movements are explained by a shift in the interest rate spread between Japan…
Today (July 18, 2024), the Australian Bureau of Statistics released the latest – Labour Force, Australia – for June 2024, which shows that the labour outlook has improved somewhat from the last several months of plodding along not sure which way to turn. While it has been difficult to make any definitive conclusions about where…
I am briefly in the UK (arrived Tuesday and returning to Melbourne early Friday). We are officially launching our new book – Modern Monetary Theory: Bill and Warren’s Excellent Adventure – later this morning at the UK MMT Conference in Leeds, England. I am avoiding many of the sessions to reduce Covid risk, given the…
Today (June 13, 2024), the Australian Bureau of Statistics released the latest – Labour Force, Australia – for May 2024, which provides some increased clarity given the last few months have generated data that has been mixed in signal. The data for May 2024 shows employment continuing to increase, unemployment falling, and the participation rate…
The Australian – Productivity Commission – was created in 1998 as a result of an amalgamation between the Industry Commission (established 1990), the Bureau of Industry Economics (established 1978) and the Economic Planning Advisory Commission (established 1983). As you will read below, its antecedents go back to 1921. The Commission is one of many government-funded…
Last month’s Labour Force data release for April 2024, revealed that the Australian labour market was starting to weaken in the face of the fiscal squeeze (the government announced a second successive annual fiscal surplus on Tuesday) and the 11 interest rate hikes since May 2022. Today (May 16, 2024), the Australian Bureau of Statistics…
Today (April 18, 2024), the Australian Bureau of Statistics released the latest – Labour Force, Australia – for March 2024, which shows that the labour market is weakening with employment falling and unemployment rising now that more normal patterns in behaviour after the holiday period disruption have returned. The good news is that full-time employment…
Regular readers will know I have been assessing the evolving data concerning the longer-run impacts of Covid on the labour force. As time passes and infections continue, our immediate awareness of the severity of the pandemic has dulled, largely because governments no longer publish regular data on infection rates, hospitalisations and deaths. So the day-to-day,…