Australia: Unemployment rate stabilizes in August
Latest reading: The seasonally adjusted unemployment rate was stable at July’s 4.2% in August, in line with market expectations. August’s reading marked the joint-highest unemployment rate since January 2022. Meanwhile, the number of employed people rose by 47,500 in August in seasonally adjusted terms, deteriorating from the 58,200 rise recorded in July. Part-time employment increased, while full-time employment fell. Meanwhile, the seasonally adjusted labor-force participation rate remained at an all-time high of 67.1%—matching market expectations—while the underemployment rate rose by 0.2 percentage points to 6.5%.
Panelist insight: Commenting on the outlook, ING’s Robert Carnell stated:
“It would be wrong to get too carried away by this month’s data. This is an extremely volatile set of figures, and we prefer to draw our conclusions only from trends, such as the 3-month moving averages […]. When examined in this way, we can see that the trend of employment growth is still being driven by full-time jobs, although the pace of full-time employment growth does seem to be waning slightly.”
Nomura’s David Seif and Andrew Ticehurst added:
“Some of the apparent labour market strength reflects strong migration growth, and this is adding to labour supply as well as to demand. Migration growth is also poised to ease; we note that monthly visa data appear to be levelling out, and the government has also announced plans to modestly trim international student intake at top universities.”