Moreover, faster consumption growth is not a given. It will depend, in part, on the pace of employment and wage growth. A downside risk is that wage growth remains subdued, which would undercut consumer spending. And, the trade sector looks likely to remain a drag on growth over the remainder of the year. Although the dollar has depreciated slightly on a broad trade-weighted basis recently, it still is more than 10 percent higher than it was a year ago. Despite the sharp slowdown in growth evident during the first half of the year, we have seen continued job gains and further falls in unemployment so far this year. Consequently, we still seem to be making progress toward our objective of maximum employment in a context of price stability. Today’s payroll and household employment reports indicate that this progress continued into May. Even with a weak month in March, job gains this year have been averaging almost 220,000 per month. The gain in May was even stronger at 280,000 and was widespread across industries. Although the 12-month change in average hourly earnings is still low at 2.3 percent, it is a bit higher than we have seen in recent years. At the same time, there is still some ways to go. The unemployment rate has changed little in the past four months at about 5½ percent, with the levels of part-time workers for economic reasons, and longduration unemployed, remaining elevated.
We as a central bank also vested enormous efforts making many adjustments in data collection, production and communication process that helped us smoothing the pandemics effect on the production and dissemination of statistics. The pandemic in the initial phase tested the resilience of the statistical system, i.e., the ability to continue with timely supply of statistical data. But it also created demand pressures for new data that was not produced by the official statistics. Data on the epidemiological curve became highly needed as they are leading indicator on how the economy will evolve and how economic and social policies should be calibrated. At the same time, there has been growing demand for real-time high-frequency data on the economy, as many of the historical systematic linkages that policy decisions were based on were broken. For instance, we have been intensively using google mobility data during the lockdowns to assess the behaviour of consumers. We have also leveraged on the private sector data for payment card transactions, as an indicator to assess the personal consumption dynamics and its structure. Although highly useful, the abundance of data also poses a challenge for statisticians, as accentuated by the health crisis. As we go further down the road, the need for quick and granular data, for example on the changes of the economic behaviour of the agents, the longer term scarring to the economy, or the impact of the policy actions on economy will be a "must".