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Summary
- China reports a massive dip in its GDP growth.
- Australia’s unemployment rate falls below 5%.
- It marks Eight consecutive month of job market improvement is Australia
The countries in the Asia Pacific (APAC) region came up with a mixed bag of macroeconomic numbers on Thursday.
While China showed a huge slump in its growth numbers, Australia, on the other hand, reported a dip in the unemployment rate in the country.
The region’s largest economy – China – saw its Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth slow down drastically, as country clocked 7.9% growth rate in the April-June quarter from a year earlier, official data showed on Thursday. The growth numbers in the world’s most populous country were 20 basis points short of the market estimate – 8.1%.
The country’s GDP growth has truncated by more than half from the previous quarter, as the world’s second largest economy clocked a record 18.3% expansion in the economy in the January-March period. Back then, in Q1 of 2021, the year-on-year (Y-on-Y) growth rate was heavily skewed by the lower base as COVID-19 induced a massive dip in the country’s economy in the first quarter of 2020.
After the GDP numbers were announced, the markets of the country were a mixed bag – the Shanghai Composite was up 23 basis points, while the Shenzhen Component was down 34 basis points.
Australia records a dip in joblessness
Meanwhile, Down Under, in Australia, the country’s statistical agency – the Australian Bureau of Statistic (ABS) – reported a dip in the unemployment rate in the country – a swing that dragged joblessness in the country way below the anticipated 5%.
The country reported an improvement of 4 basis points in the unemployment rate, that stood at 4.9% in June 2021.
“The unemployment rate fell to 4.9% in June. This was 0.4 percentage points below March 2020 (5.3%) and the lowest it has been since December 2010. The declining unemployment rate continues to coincide with employers reporting high levels of job vacancies and difficulties in finding suitable people for them,” said Bjorn Jarvis, head of labour statistics at the ABS.
The Australian stock markets witnessed a bit of turnaround after the country marked the eighth consecutive month of decline in the joblessness. ASX200 – the country’s premier benchmark – pared part of its early morning losses and was trading at a loss of 26 basis points.
