Australia is seeing strong job gains
Australia's services sector is posting gains as the country capped its strongest year for job growth in the previous month. The growth is also consequently the strongest since 2006.
According to Bloomberg, Australia's job report revealed the following:
-Employment declined by 1,000 since November against expectations of 10,000 drop
-Unemployment was at 5.8 percent as opposed to predictions at 5.9 percent
-Part-time employment went down by 18,500 but full-time employments grew to 17,600
The participation rate -- which measures the labour force in relation to the population -- also went from 65.3 percent to 65.1 percent. This is against what economists predicted at 65.2 percent. Policy makers in the country appear to be more focused on directing the economy's reliance to industries like construction, education and tourism instead on natural resources.
The transition was possible after the central bank reduced its benchmark to a record-low 2 percent in May. Not to mention, the currency has also gone down by as much as 15 percent in the year. However, there are also concerns on the accuracy of the job figures released.
“Most people will conclude that the economy is doing well and transitioning away from mining toward service sectors,” explained interest-rate strategist at Nomura Holdings Inc. in Sydney, Andrew Ticehurst.
“There’s some positive signs here but we need to think about the pace of growth which is going to be created under this transition.”
According to Business Insider, Australia's jobs report is best known to offer the unexpected. For instance, the figures reported have been linked to being volatile while also earning their fair share of critics. The former head of the ABS said last year that recent changes to seasonal adjustments within the survey can imply that what the figures represented may not be "worth the paper they were printed on."
Furthermore, ABS also issued a disclaimer on its data with the NAB suggesting that “sample rotation effects should be taken into account when interpreting implausibly large headline employment changes.”
