Australia: Moderate job creation in February – Standard Chartered

The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) will release February labour-market data on 19 March. Chidu Narayanan, an economist at Standard Chartered Bank, shares his forecast. 

Key quotes 

“We expect the unemployment rate to have remained at 5.3% and the participation rate at 66.1%. We estimate moderate job creation of 13,000 jobs, despite full-time job losses.”

“We continue to expect the unemployment rate to rise above 5.5% in the medium term as construction jobs are lost.”

“We see the central bank cutting the rate by a further 25bps in April, taking the policy cash rate to its floor of 0.25%; we expect to see unconventional easing measures in H2.”