Payroll Jobs Index shows the Impact of Covid-19 on Victoria's Economy

Sep 25, 2020 3-minute read

Australia • Economy • Covid-19 • Payroll-Jobs-Index • Unemployment

App: Payroll Jobs and Wages Index

Visit our Payroll Jobs and Wages Index App and build customised visualisations here: Link

Data: ABS - 6160.0.55.001 - Weekly Payroll Jobs and Wages in Australia

Payroll Jobs Index is collected on a weekly basis and released fortnightly.

According to ABS: “The Australian Taxation Office (ATO) receives payroll information from businesses with Single Touch Payroll (STP) enabled payroll and accounting software each time the business runs its payroll. The ATO provides selected business and job level data items from the STP system to the ABS for the production of statistics.”

“A payroll job is a relationship between an employee and their employing enterprise, where the employee is paid in the reference week through STP-enabled payroll or accounting software and reported to the ATO. Where an employee is paid other than weekly, the established payment pattern is used to include jobs paid in weeks outside the reference week.”

“Employers with 20 or more employees (large employers) commenced transition to STP reporting on 1 July 2018, with approximately 99% of large employers reporting through STP at the time of this release. Employers with less than 20 employees (small employers) began transitioning to STP on 1 July 2019. As such at the beginning of June 2020, approximately 86% of small employers are reporting through STP.”

How to read the index?

Estimates are supplied as indexes to provide an indication of movements (rather than level estimates) during the COVID-19 period. In order to compare changes over time, the week Australia recorded its 100th confirmed coronavirus case (i.e. week ending 14th March 2020) is used as the reference period for constructing the indexes and given an index value of 100.0. To make the plots more readable, we have then converted the value of 100 to zero so the changes in unemployment appear as a percentage change in the plots.

National Trends

First let’s have a look at the the overall performance across the country. The first plot presents the payroll jobs index across all jurisdictions.

The slow recovery across almost all jurisdictions except Victoria is visible in the plot while the impact of Stage 3 and 4 lockdowns in Victoria appears soon after the restrictions started.

Victoria

Now let’s focus further on Victoria and especially the second wave. Here, I have looked into the change in the jobs index between the start of the second wave of Covid-19 in Victoria and the latest datapoint in this article on 5th of September. As the plot shows, the impact of restrictions in Victoria has been much larger among younger (under 30) and older (above 60) workers. Moreover, at both ends of the plot, the decline in the index has been larger for women than men.

The next figure shows the impact across different industries. While there have been major adverse impacts in some areas such as accommodation and food, large and medium size firms across some other sectors showed resilience in August. Moreover and not surprisingly, the decline seems to have been stronger during the Stage 4 lockdown. To be able to visualise this data in more detail, please visit our Payroll Jobs and Wages Index App