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By Esther Tanquintic-Misa: Subscribe to Esther's RSS feed | August 6, 2012 10:09 AM GMT
For the fourth month in a row, Australia's labour sector notices and advertisements in newspapers and on the Internet continued to decelerate.
Latest survey results released on Monday by the Australia and New Zealand Banking Group (ANZ) showed that the number of total job advertisements published in July dropped 0.8 per cent to 159,398, connoting a fourth consecutive monthly fall in job ads.
In June, job ads plummeted by 1.1 per cent.
Overall, advertisements are now down 9.1 per cent from a year ago.
Job ads placed likewise fell 0.7 per cent to 152,664 in July, compared to June, representing a reduction of 8.6 per cent year-on-year. Newspapers ads slipped 3.2 per cent, continuing a long-run shift away from newspapers toward Internet ads.
Analysts' expectations for July were actually at -1.1 per cent, online portal www.actionforex.com said.
"Recent trends in job advertising continue to suggest that there has been a mild softening in overall labour demand in Australia, notwithstanding the strength in the mining sector," said Ivan Colhoun, ANZ's head of Australian economics.
"While the bank is clearly happy to assess for the next few months the impact of recent interest rate reductions on the economy, we expect that later in the year, slower than desirable employment growth will allow modest further interest rate reductions."
Mr Colhoun likewise noted the trend in employment growth and unemployment over the coming months will most likely be used as an important leverage by the Reserve Bank in its future deliberations on monetary policy.
ANZ expects official unemployment data to jump 5.3 per cent in July, from 5.2 per cent in June and 5.1 per cent in May.
The central bank is expected to announce its decision on interest rates on Tuesday at 0430 GMT. of which the economists expect it to remain unchanged at 3.5 per cent.
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