Just a quickie …
From a Westpac note this morning:
- Given no other changes by the ABS (something we can’t guarantee) Westpac has estimated the following revisions to total employment.
- Jul will be revised from –4.1k to +3.5k
- Aug will be revised from +121.0k to +32.1k. (Westpac had forecast a rise of 15k for Aug.)
- Our Jobs Index suggests that an annual pace of employment growth of around 1½%yr is about right. But we also note that the recent improvement in the employment indicators from the business surveys, and in particular the various AiGroup surveys, suggest that employment growth could accelerate to around 2%yr by year end or early 2015.
- For that reason we are forecasting +25k for total employment in Sep which will lift the annual pace to 1.6%yr.
- We should also note that this will produce a total rise over the two months to Sep of +57.1k. In the two months to Sep 2013 total employment in original terms (remembering the ABS has turned off the seasonal factors for Jul, Aug and Sep this year) was 60.9k.
- Assuming a small rise in participation to 64.8% (as it was in Jun) and a trend gain in working age population then the unemployment rate drops to 5.9%.