Australian Labour Market Essay

514 Words2 Pages

As described in the previous section, Australia has been experiencing an economic boom for several years. In order to continue such a successful story, a functioning labour market is necessary.
A closer look at the Australian labour market illustrates that it is predominantly dominated by the service sector. In 2017, almost 80% of the employees worked in this area. The remaining 20% were employed in sectors like mining, construction, manufacturing or agriculture (ABS, 2018). An appropriate approach to analyse the efficiency of a labour market is to calculate the employment rate. According to the theory, there is a correlation between economic growth and the number of unemployed persons. Consequently, as the economy grows, the unemployment …show more content…

(ABS, 2018). This trend is partly due to the support of the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA), which reduced the cash rate. Through this expansive monetary policy, Australia tried to place cheap money in circulation in order to stimulate the economy which should make more jobs available (RBA, n.d.). However, it must be critically noted that, despite the incredible economic growth of recent years, Australia has not managed to keep the unemployment rate permanently below five percent. This is also due to the fact that the employer side sometimes has serious difficulties to keep pace with the increase in workforce (RBA, 2013). Furthermore, some experts suspect the reason for the level of unemployment is the high minimum wage. Indeed, Australia has a very high minimum wage, but this varies due to age and industry. As a result, 24% of Australians employees only received the minimum wage in 2017. However, the impact of the minimum wage on the unemployment has not yet been proven (Mather, 2017). From a macroeconomic point of view this situation can be described as an oversupply of labour (Keat, Young & Erfle, 2014) A wage increase will only be possible, if the unemployment rate decreased to the RBA determined natural unemployment rate of five percent

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