Employment intentions weak

*Source jobfix.co.nz

Locally the number of job advertisement continued to trend lower in March while the number of applications have more than double from this time last year. Job ads dropped 9% from February and have declined 61% over March last year.

Nationally online job adverts in March were also below February by 4% and down 27% on March last year reinforcing the weakness in the current round of economic statistics.

Drilling into key industry sector data, hospitality and tourism which locally is the major employment sector showed no growth in March and is tracking significantly behind the same time last year. Construction, Health, Retail, Finance while up on last month are all tracking below last year.

Electronic Card Transactions

National Electronic Card Transactions data came out last week revealed a 0.7% decline in retail spending in March and a 0.6% decline in core retail. For the quarter, both measures were clearly negative in real terms suggesting that the protracted retail recession is continuing.