New Zealand – Unemployment rate rises to 6.8% as available jobs dry up

The unemployment rate expectedly rose in the second quarter as the pool of jobs shrank for the time since December 2010…

The unemployment rate increased 0.1% percentage points to 6.8%, the highest since June 2010, according to Statistics New Zealand’s household labour force survey. Economists surveyed by Reuters were expecting the headline rate to come down to 6.5%. The number of unemployed people rose 1.1% to 162,000.

The number of people employed shrank 0.1% to 2.23 million, short of the 0.3% growth forecast by economists.

The participation rate fell 0.3 percentage points to 68.4% after swelling to a three-year high in the March quarter, lower than the forecast 68.6%. The number of people not in the labour force rose 1.1% to 1.1 million…

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