New data on the health of Scotland’s labour market was released this morning. These provide an update on key indicators like unemployment and employment. In this blog we highlight the key features of these data and highlight some interesting trends.
Category: Labour Market
One of the interesting features of the Scottish economic data landscape is that both the Scottish Government and the ONS produce their own separate measures of economic growth for Scotland.
Recently we got some new National Accounts data from the Scottish Government as well as new data from the ONS for GVA growth across the devolved nations and English regions.
With two different datasets on economic growth in Scotland being released relatively close to one another, it’s possible to see whether or not they tell the same story, and if not, why not?
This blog summarises some of the key insights from the data released this morning.
Today’s labour market data for Scotland show a slight increase in the unemployment rate this quarter of 0.1% points to 4%, although the unemployment rate is still down 0.8% points over the year. Further, while the employment rate is unchanged over the past quarter, it has grown by 1.6% points over the last year.
These data and changes over the past year and quarter are summarised in the table below for different parts of the UK (green shading indicates an improvement for that measure and red shading a worsening of performance on that measure). Scotland continues to have an employment rate above the average for the UK, and an unemployment rate below the average for the UK.
In recent months we have seen relatively strong headline labour market indicators in both Scotland and the UK.
But this only tells part of the story. The types of jobs being created, the levels of security and prospects they provide, and crucially the earnings received are just as important.
UK data has shown that the strong growth in employment has been accompanied by a squeeze in real earnings.
Data on earnings for Scotland is much harder to come by. But this week we had the latest Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings (ASHE) publication which gives some insight into earnings in Scotland.
This blog summarises the headline results for April 2017 and what they could be telling us about the health of the Scottish labour market.
Today saw the release of fresh data on the Scottish labour market from the ONS which (mostly!) cover data up to June 2017. Some additional data only cover the period up to March 2017.The main data can be accessed here.
In this blog, we pull out and highlight the key trends in these data.
Essentially, headline indicators of Scotland’s labour market remain good, but we need to bear in mind that, as always, the health of Scotland’s labour market is more complicated than headline numbers.