Labour market report from Australia for January 2019

The 'employment change' and 'unemployment rate' are the two headline focal points

Employment Change:+39.1 K HUGE BEAT

  • expected 15.0K, prior 21.6K

Unemployment Rate: 5.0%

  • expected 5.0%, prior 5.0%

Full Time Employment Change: 65.4K huge result

  • prior was -3K

Part Time Employment Change: -26.3K

  • prior was 24.6K

Participation Rate: 65.7%

  • expected 65.6%, prior was 65.6%

These are blockbuster numbers … guess we await the 'yeah, but's ...' now …

ABS caution to look at the 'trend' numbers rather than the seasonally adjusted ones (those are the numbers reported above and are what the immediate focus is).

  • trend monthly employment increased by 24,900
  • Full-time employment increased by 16,800
  • part-time employment increased by 8,100
  • Over the past year, trend employment increased by 295,500 persons (2.4 per cent)which was above the average annual growth over the past 20 years (2.0 per cent).
  • trend employment to population ratio, which shows how employed the population is, rose to a 10 year high of 62.4 per cent.
  • trend monthly hours worked increased by 0.1 per cent in January 2019 and by 1.6 per cent over the past year. This was slightly below the 20 year average year-on-year growth of 1.7 per cent.
  • trend monthly underemployment rate remained steady at 8.3 per cent and decreased by 0.3 percentage points over the year. The trend underutilisation rate also remained steady at 13.3 per cent, and decreased by 0.7 percentage points over the past year.

more to come

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