July 10, 2017 10:00am by David Farrar

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: