February 2013 Employment Report

I’ve been a busy beaver these last few days, conducting training and doing presentations, which explains the lack of posts. Not that there’s much news to pick from.

However, the employment report for February came out on Monday, and the unemployment rate is back down (‘000):

After the sharp drop in employment in December, the economy has added 222k jobs in the last couple of months. Since the recession of 2009, employment has increased by nearly 2.2 million workers (‘000):

The unemployment rate is back to below its median level over the past three years:

I continue to think that the labour market is too tight, which is partly supported by manufacturing wage data:

Per worker wages are closing some of the gap with gross productivity, largely due to falling sales. This could, as with other economic numbers in Jan-Feb, be due entirely to CNY, though the magnitude is abnormal.

If true, we should see a degree of normalcy in the numbers for March. However, if the measures I’m seeing here continue to diverge, there will be some interesting things to talk about next month.

Technical Notes:

February 2013 Employment Report from the Department of Statistics (warning: pdf link)