August Pulse
Since July last year, amidst the doubts and turmoils of the economy, we bagan an exercise to attempt to develop some indicators that help give us a little more (and faster) insight into how all aspects of the local economy were fearing.
We called it the Hutt City Pulse. It is still a work in progress -basically we began to look for local indicators that confirmed what we were seeing and hearing when we visited businesses and social agencies -but that sometimes can take up to 18 months to confirm if you rely on official data.
Having complied a list of possible indicators we began to track historical data and see how it matched up with those same official stats over the last deacde or so. We still have some gaps and don’t claim that it is an exact or 100% scientificly robust method, but already it has been usefull when talking to businesses and to alert us to potential issues and in informing how we carry out our economic development activities.
We aim to release the Pulse monthly about ten days or so after month end. In about two weeks we will release and comment on our August data. In the mean time the graph above shows two of the employemt figures we collect -Trademe job ads for Hutt City and official local registerd unemployment. Some interesting observations can be made:
- The numberof Jobs advertised has consitantly been higher from January 2010, and over comparable July and August months over the two years shows a higher number of jobs available in 2010.
- Unemployment in the city peaked between December 2009 and January 2010 and has now settled to around 2000 people -about the same as September 2009 -but up considerable from July 2009.
If unemployment is an annual cycle -do we need to expect higher unemployment in coming months as we head towards the December -January period? The Trademe jobs data perhaps provides some assurance that (with more jobs than the same time last year) this will not be the case.