March 2013 Employment

The employment situation in March remained pretty stable, neither too hot nor too cold (‘000):

As always, there’s lots of noise in the series, but the general tenor is of slower/negligible employment growth in March. The unadjusted employment number registers at 45k jobs created during the month.

The same can’t be said of unemployment:

Again, there’s lots of noise, so I’ve added a moving average line to tease out the short term trend. It’s unquestionably moving up and the raw numbers are considerably more volatile as well, which certainly suggests that economic activity has fallen off in the last six months.

That fits in with all the other data that came in with 1Q2013 numbers, so this is more confirmation than anything else.

Technical Notes:

March 2013 Employment report from the Department of Statistics (warning: pdf link)