66 more jobs an hour
The other day I heard the Prime Minister say that in the last year the New Zealand economy created an extra 10,000 jobs a month.
This sounded far fetched to me. I knew we had reasonable job growth but surely not 10,000 a month. So I checked and indeed the Prime Minister was wrong.
In fact the job growth was 11,500 a month!
In March 2016 there were 2,402,000 in employment and in March 2017 there were 2,539,000. And 81% of the new jobs were full-time.
That is:
- 137,000 net new jobs in 12 months
- 11,500 new jobs a month
- 2,600 new jobs a week
- 66 new jobs per working hour (40/week)
So think about this. You attend a one hour meeting. By the end of that meeting, there would have been (on average) 66 more jobs than at the start of the meeting.
For a country with such a small population, 11,500 new jobs a month is remarkable. That is the equivalent of the US growing by 800,000 jobs a month.
As a percentage that is a 5.7% increase in the number of jobs in a year. Here’s the growth rate for jobs for some other countries:
- NZ 5.7%
- Germany 2.9%
- Ireland 2.9%
- US 1.8%
- OECD 1.6%
- Australia 1.6%
- Sweden 1.5%
- UK 1.4%
- Canada 0.7%
- France 0.6%
- Finland 0.5%