UK Employment Falls to Five Year Low While Wages Dissapoint

May 14, 2014 Share Print 0

The number of people out of work in the UK fell by 133,000 to a fresh five-year low of 2.2 million in the three months to March, official figures show.

The jobless rate also fell to a five-year low of 6.8%, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) said.

The number of people in work rose to 30.43 million, the highest since records began in 1971, helped by a rise in self-employment.

Average earnings in the three months to March were up 1.7% from a year earlier.

The growth rate in wages – which includes bonuses – was unchanged from the previous month and was slower than analysts had expected.

However, with the inflation rate at 1.6% in March – as measured by the Consumer Prices Index (CPI) – it means earnings rose faster than inflation for the first time since 2010.

Excluding bonuses, earnings grew by 1.3% in the three months to March when compared with a year earlier.

via BBC

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Alfonso Esparza

Senior Currency Analyst at Market Pulse

Alfonso Esparza specializes in macro forex strategies for North American and major currency pairs. Upon joining OANDA in 2007, Alfonso Esparza established the MarketPulseFX blog and he has since written extensively about central banks and global economic and political trends. Alfonso has also worked as a professional currency trader focused on North America and emerging markets. He has been published by The MarketWatch, Reuters, the Wall Street Journal and The Globe and Mail, and he also appears regularly as a guest commentator on networks including Bloomberg and BNN. He holds a finance degree from the Monterrey Institute of Technology and Higher Education (ITESM) and an MBA with a specialization on financial engineering and marketing from the University of Toronto.