28 January 2020
The Reserve Bank of New Zealand (RBNZ) is now mandated to support the maximum sustainable level of employment. This new
objective has lead us to look for new sources of data that allow us to better understand and predict labour market
outcomes.
We use data measuring the changes in employment states of all tax-paying New Zealanders to nowcast the unemployment rate
in New Zealand. We find that using this wide-coverage data set helps us to estimate current unemployment more accurately
than the standard forecasting benchmarks.
ends
ends