Dropouts making things look better


A modest little fall in the unemployment rate as the growth of full time jobs continued is better news than the opposite but this is clearly a very slow and gradual economic recovery. The unemployment rate in May of 5.2 per cent is still the same as it was in January while the participation rate has gone down in that five months by 0.2 percentage points and at May’s 61.7% the proportion of eligible Australians in the work force has dropped from the 62.6% it was at when the Labor Government won office.
10-06-2010 employmentandunemployment
Not that figures like that are of the slightest interest to those economists who see virtue in wanting to impose harshness on others. They were out quickly after the release of the Australian Bureau of Statistics positively salivating at the prospect of there being another couple of interest rate rises before year’s end.

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