Australia: Wage growth expected to remain at 2.3% in Q1 - ANZ

Catherine Birch, analyst at ANZ, suggests that they expect to see an increase of 0.6% q/q in Australia’s Q1 2019 wage data, which will be released on Wednesday 15th May and will result in maintaining of annual growth at 2.3%.

Key Quotes

“We are forecasting a gradual pick-up in wage growth to 2.4% by Q4 2019. This is dependent on our expectation that the unemployment rate will track sideways at around 5%. Any rise in the unemployment rate would stifle the (slow) progress that wage growth has made over the past couple of years.”

“However, for wage growth to continue to improve (and for it to get anywhere near the long-run average over the longer-term) we see a sustained, material decline in the underemployment rate as the key requirement.”