5 After declining sharply and dipping well below the prior trend in the years following the crisis, participation has been roughly flat since late 2013. Relative to this estimate of the declining trend, three years of flat participation implies a cyclical improvement of roughly 1 percentage point.
Normally in a recession, income falls and many people draw on their savings to get through the hard times. But in the June quarter, when fears about the pandemic were at their peak, the household saving rate surged to 20 per cent, the highest in almost 50 years (Graph 7).