ONLY CHARTS #607

Aus underemployment errors, NZ manufacturing PMI, NZ Truckometer

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1. Last week we highlighted an unusual divergence between the different historical and ‘new’ underemployment rates published by the ABS for Australia - see chart.

Well, recent observations for the historical series were wrong. The ABS said this:

The ABS has identified a systems error which led to the underemployment and underutilisation data originally published in this release to be incorrect. This issue does not affect the core Labour Force measures. That is, it does not affect employment, the unemployment rate, the participation rate or hours worked data.

The corrected data (for the black line below) now show a clearer recent pick-up in the underemployment rate in a broadly similar fashion to the newer, more narrowly based, measure published by the ABS (orange line).

These things can happen, but the timing is unfortunate as it coincides with the ABS’ overhaul of the labour force survey (the so-called Modernising the Labour Force Survey).

Big changes to the LFS can be challenging and while the ABS has noted that it is closely quality assuring the data through the changes, we always worry that things can go wrong given they have in the past when survey overhauls have occurred.

2. The recent increase in Australia’s underemployment rate has not been uniform across age groups. The clearest increase has been for young workers aged 15-24 years old.