Economics update | July 21, 2023

21 Jul 2023

The labour market remains extremely tight, with the most recent ABS Labour Force data, released yesterday, showing unemployment settling back to its low of 3.5 per cent. Unemployment has sat at this low level for the past 12 months , suggesting the labour market has reached its lower limit.

An additional 33,000 people joined the workforce in June, taking the number of employed people to 14.05 million. Overall, 410,000 people were added to the workforce over the past year, an increase of 3 per cent. More than 90 per cent of these additional workers were employed full time, with 380,000 full-time jobs added since June 2022.

There has been much discussion in the past week on comments by the incoming governor of the Reserve Bank, Michele Bullock, that employment will increase to return inflation to the target range of 2-3 per cent. Earlier research by the Reserve Bank and Treasury indicates full employment (the non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment – NAIRU) to be around 4.5 per cent, suggesting a 150,000 increase in the number of unemployed people, from the current level of a little over 500,000.







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