August Unemployment Update

by Roger Harmer on 25 August, 2012

UK unemployment continued its recent decline, falling by 46,000 in the three months to June 2012, while employment grew by 201,000 in the same period. Meanwhile the July seasonally adjusted claimant count figures show this section of unemployment fell by 5,900 in the UK in the month to 1.593m. In Birmingham it fell by 507 to 50,119. Meanwhile in Aoccks Green the unadjusted claimant count (which normally rises in July) rose by 5 to 1,183.

The mystery of how employment rose so strongly in the second quarter, when the economy is supposed to have shrunk, was lessened slightly when the second quarter growth figures were revised upwards from -0.7% to -0.5%. However (and even allowing for the extra bank holiday which, if taken into account, would revise this further to around 0.0%), the mystery remains, as in the past the economy would have had to be growing at around 2% to be generating more jobs. What isn’t in doubt is that a huge number of private sector jobs have been created in the past two years; the total is now approaching 650,000, of which around 400,000 are high skilled jobs.

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