September 2008 quarter job creation lowest in five years

There were 102,770 jobs created and 129,290 jobs were destroyed during the September 2008 quarter, Statistics New Zealand said today. This was the smallest number of jobs created during a quarter since March 2003. Job creation was down 14.3 percent and job destruction was up 5.3 percent compared with the September 2007 quarter. The job turnover rate was 6.3 percent and the worker turnover rate was 15.0 percent in the September 2008 quarter. These were the lowest job and worker turnover rates since the LEED series began in June 1999.

The number of filled jobs increased 1.3 percent to reach 1,823,690 in the year to September 2008. The growth in filled jobs over the September 2008 year was driven by the professional, scientific, and technical services; health care and social assistance; and public administration and safety industries. However, the number of filled jobs also declined across a number of industries over the September 2008 year, including the manufacturing; retail trade; accommodation and food services; financial and insurance services; and the rental, hiring, and real estate service industries.

The LEED quarterly series is published with a lag of four quarters and uses information from existing taxation and Statistics NZ sources to provide a range of information on the dynamics of the New Zealand labour market. The large size of the dataset allows breakdowns by age, sex, industry, sector, firm size, region, and territorial authority. These breakdowns are available on Infoshare and Table Builder on the Statistics NZ website. For more information on LEED, see theGuide to Interpreting the LEED Data.