There is some good news for Victoria in September payroll jobs data
App: Payroll Jobs and Wages Index
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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.”
Read more about the data here: Link
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.
Australia and Victoria
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 plot clearly shows the impact of the second wave of restrictions in Victoria. However, it seems that overall the trend for the payroll jobs index has stabilised in Victoria in the past two weeks.
However, interestingly, most of the increase in the index in Victoria seems to be driven by an increase in the index for the Under 20 age group and the improvement in other age groups has been relatively modest.
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 September 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
