I THINK I AM beginning to make some headway at last. Our editorial yesterday on the latest job figures finally made the point that rising unemployment is mostly the result of a growing labour force.
It is time that this understanding was spread more widely among journalists. Our news report on these figures still made out that 'a further 9,200 people lost their jobs'.
Not so. The three-month average of the number of jobs in the SAR at the end of February was exactly the same as at the end of January, 3,228,800, and this, by the way, was still higher than at the end of November. That increase in unemployment is all down to more people entering the labour force.
What sort of person is this labour force entrant? Short answer: She is a woman. There are now fewer men in the labour force than there were four years ago but the number of women in it has grown by 165,000 over the same period.
This is partly because a rising proportion of women are looking for jobs while the labour force participation rate of men is declining. It is also a reflection of a demographic trend. There were fewer women than men in our resident population in June 1996. There are now 167,000 more women than men.
Natural increase alone does not explain this. There are consistently more male than female births in Hong Kong but there are even more male deaths and, in terms of natural increase alone, the proportion of women in the population is thus rising slightly.
Natural increase is itself very slight, however, and can account for only a fraction of the increase in female population. The difference clearly stems from net immigration and we can therefore define our typical labour force entrant a little more closely. She is likely to be a recent immigrant.