The FINANCIAL — One vital factor in the road to economic recovery is the state of the job market.
In the second quarter of 2014, an important milestone was reached when half of global online respondents in Nielsen’s Global Consumer Confidence survey said they believed the job market would be good or excellent in the upcoming year, a 1 percentage-point increase from the first quarter. While the quarterly increase was marginal, it was just enough to reach the pre-recession outlook of 50 percent—a level not achieved in seven years, according to the Nielsen Company.
Consumers’ positive perceptions toward local job prospects over the next 12 months increased in every region except Latin America during the quarter. The biggest quarterly surge in job optimism came from North America, increasing 8 percentage points to 46 percent. Meanwhile, Asia-Pacific respondents were most optimistic about employment opportunities: 65 percent believe that job prospects were favorable for the year ahead, up from 64 percent the previous quarter.
The outlook for future job prospects also increased in the Middle East/Africa (42%) and Europe (29%), rising 2 and 1 percentage points from the first quarter, respectively. In Latin America, 36 percent of respondents registered positive perceptions of employment opportunities, down from 42 percent in the first quarter, according to the Nielsen Company.
“In the U.S., consistent trends concerning non-farm payroll growth and stable unemployment claims provide a welcome counterweight to the unexpectedly large decline in GDP growth in the first quarter,” said Dr. Venkatesh Bala, chief economist at The Cambridge Group, a part of Nielsen. “Payroll growth is visible across a range of sectors, which is also positive. However, real-wage growth of workers has been anemic so far, and needs to pick up substantially, along with other improvements in the labor market, in order for consumer spending to increase in a broad-based way,” Bala added.
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