Tracking Australian Jobs and Wages impacted by Covid-19

BACKGROUND

Recently, the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) has been sharing new sets of data showcasing the economic and demographic impact of Covid-19. They’ve done so via a series of surveys that are new and some of which they’ve normally run but have now housed in a common area (here: https://www.abs.gov.au/covid19). One area that came out this week (21st April) pertains to Weekly Payroll Jobs and Wages (https://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/mf/6160.0.55.001) and that is what I analyse in this article.

Firstly, if you’re unfamiliar with National Statistics whether from the ABS or other agencies, you need to understand the concept of indexes. They are numbers created to enable and simplify comparisons. Without doing this you’re literally comparing apples with oranges (or dollars with population or population with other economic measures). Using an Index of 100 is common to provide a baseline. Depending on the measure, a score above the baseline of 100 could mean prices are going up and below 100 it could mean the measure is declining.

To look at the impact on Employee Jobs and Wages, the ABS has deployed a similar index with the 100 baseline being the week ending 14th March 2020 as that was when we had our 100th confirmed case. Jobs are based on the count of employees in different industries and wages are the weekly value of wages. They also divide these into cross sections by State, Age, Industry.

THE APP

To make analysis on this easier, I built an app which you can access here (LINK).

For example, I can use the bar charts and select the top average sector in terms of jobs (in this case Transport), the state of NSW and Females. The bottom right chart, as a result shows what has happened to the jobs index in the lead up to Australia’s 100th case of Covid19 and what happened after. I’ve highlighted the week of the 14th in orange so that you can clearly see what happened before and after. In this case, like most other industries transport jobs declined.

You can make selections either with the filters on the left hand side or by holding down CTRL as you make selections in the bar charts on the page.

I can also switch to the Wages Index (see the 2 menu options at the top of the page) and this time I can select the latest period on the time series graph (4th April 2020). Doing this means I can see which which industries were ranked low in terms of wages. It turns out it was Accommodation and selecting this then shows that South Australia was the worst state. You can then see that the time series chart show the evolution of this industry for South Australia in the lead up and after the 14th March.

This app is connected to the online version of this ABS data and I’ve set it to refresh every day to check if new info has been pulled in.

For more insights like this or to get in touch please find my contact details below

Mark Monfort (Head of Data Analytics and Technology)

• Phone: 02 8262 8700
• Email: mmonfort@prosperity.com.au