UPDATE 1 – The Australian central bank confident in its data on employment and its tax collection



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By Wayne Cole

SYDNEY, March 26 (Reuters) – The Australian central bank is confident that domestic job data can be trusted since it comes from a number of independent sources, but fears that the health of the labor market not be exaggerated.

The Assistant Governor of the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA), Luci Ellis, also said that this man was one of the reasons for poor growth in income and consumption in recent years, even though Employment remained stable.

"Over the last six years, tax-paid growth has outpaced that of above-average margin earnings, at a time when revenue growth itself was slow," said Ellis, who heads the department. economic affairs of the bank.

She cited various reasons for this change, including compliance efforts and technological advances in tax collection.

"The tax office indicates that its efforts to improve compliance with work-related deductions have significantly increased revenues," said Ellis.

Taxes paid by households have increased by about 8% over the past year, she added, more than double the rate of growth of gross household income of 3.5% .

The RBA has for some time been trying to reconcile the weakness of household consumption with the strength of the labor market, and this rise in tax levies could be one of the reasons for this dichotomy.

Scott Morrison's Conservative government has celebrated the flow of money in its coffers and is expected to use a large portion to fund tax cuts and other sweeteners in its annual budget on April 2.

The government is lagging badly in the polls before the federal election scheduled for May.

Financial markets have bet that low consumption would weigh on employment and force the RBA to lower its interest rates.

Still, Ellis pointed out that there was no sign of data decline. The latest February employment report showed that the unemployment rate had reached its lowest level in eight years, or 4.9%.

"The labor market has improved unambiguously," she said. "One can be reasonably confident in the direction of labor market data because they come from several sets of data collected independently."

"Many of our own liaison contacts also tell us that they're hiring."

This resilience was slowly pushing up wage growth, although Ellis acknowledged that unemployment is likely to decline further to produce a sharp acceleration in growth. (Wayne Cole Report, edited by Sandra Maler and Lisa Shumaker)

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