THE NUMBERS signing on the Live Register reached 201,756 in May, the first time the Live Register total has exceeded 200,000 since July 1999, according to data released yesterday by the Central Statistics Office.
In the year to May, benefit claimants rose by 47,746 or 31 per cent, the largest annual increase recorded on the Live Register since records commenced in 1967.
The unemployment rate edged up from 5.2 per cent in April to 5.4 per cent in May. The unemployment rate in May 2007 stood at 4.6 per cent.
While the Live Register is a record of benefit claimants rather than a measure of unemployment, changes in the numbers on the register provide a snapshot of short-run trends in the numbers out of work.
Conditions in the labour market have taken a decided turn for the worse since the beginning of the year. In the first five months of 2008, Live Register unemployment has risen by 35,700 when seasonal factors have been eliminated. This represents a 20.8 per cent increase in the seasonally-adjusted numbers on the register since the end of December.
Trends during May mirrored this deterioration. On a seasonally-adjusted basis, the numbers on the register increased by 7,600 to 207,300 last month
Of the 35,700 addition to the seasonally-adjusted numbers on the register since the start of the year, 25,600 were men and 10,100 were women.
In the early months of the year, the vast majority of those joining the dole queues were men. This reflected the slowdown in construction, where male employment predominates. However, over the past three months, there has been a sizeable increase in the number of women signing on the register. This signals that the slowdown is spreading from construction into other sectors of the economy.
The weakening in labour market conditions this year is evidenced also by the increase in the number of redundancies. In the first five months of this year, the number of redundancies reached 13,564, according to figures released last week by the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment. This represented an increase of 2,889 or 27.1 per cent on the level of redundancies in the corresponding period of 2007.
More generally, combined with the near-€1.2 billion shortfall in Government tax receipts in the five months to May, the rise in redundancies and rapid additions to the numbers claiming unemployment benefits indicate an acute deterioration in Irish economic performance in the first half of 2008.
Moreover, economists say labour market conditions will deteriorate further. Alan McQuaid, economist at Bloxham stockbrokers, said yesterday that he anticipated that the unemployment rate would rise to 6 per cent or more over the next 12 to 18 months.
The unemployment rate - the numbers out of work as a percentage of the labour force - is derived from Live Register data.
