AS USUAL, most of the commentary on the latest unemployment rate figures concentrates on that headline number of 6.7 per cent. Let us peer a little at some of its more interesting features.
The simple way to calculate the unemployment rate is to subtract the number of people employed from the number of people in the labour force. You then take the result - people unemployed - as a percentage of the labour force.
But leave professional statisticians to do it and you quickly get fancy refinements. Ours goes by the name of X-11-ARIMA and I have been told how it works but it is so convoluted that I forget.
In any case that 6.7 per cent comes from the X-11-ARIMA technique. Do it the old simple way and, as the first chart shows, you get only a 6.3 per cent unemployment rate, not a record. The figure was higher two years ago. It is my guess that some people in Census and Statistics are beginning to regret they opted for fancy games with figures.
I am all the more sure of it because when it came to saying how many more people were unemployed last month they did not cite 22,000, the X-11-ARIMA figure, but 9,200, the straightforward old style number.
This, however, still leaves us with the vexed question that pops up every month. Was this rise in unemployment caused by fewer jobs or by more workers in the labour force looking for jobs? The politicians always talk as if it were all job loss and, as usual, the politicians are wrong.