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    	<span class="datetime">On Thursday 10 March 2011, 8:46 EST</span>
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                        <p></p><p>

Official jobs figures due out today are expected to show 20,000 jobs were created in February.</p><p>

A survey by Bloomberg of 20 economists shows, on average, they are forecasting the unemployment rate to remain steady at 5 per cent.</p><p>

Commonwealth Bank economist James McIntyre says while jobs growth has been weak in the retail sector, most other parts of the economy are enjoying solid gains.</p><p>

"In particular the business services sector, be it administration, accounting, legal - all of those things have actually been recovering very strongly, as well as the jobs growth that we've been seeing as the mining sector has recovered from its big GFC hit," he said.</p><p>

But he says if jobs growth is that strong, the unemployment rate could beat the estimates.</p><p>

"We're expecting that that will mean the unemployment rate should fall below 5 per cent territory - the first time it's been there for quite some time," he said.</p><p>

He says if the labour market continues to strengthen, employers will need to offer higher wages to attract workers.</p><p>

That in turn could fuel inflation and put pressure on the Reserve Bank to raise interest rates later this year.</p><p>

"So it's a potentially worrying sign there that if we don't either see a pick-up in immigration and a pick-up in labour supply, or alternatively, a bit of a slowdown perhaps in the jobs growth, we could see that feeding through to inflation pressures later in the year and that could be troubling," Mr McIntyre said.</p>


 
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                    </div></div><p><strong>Read more:</strong> <a class="rssreadon" rel="external" title="Jobs tipped to grow by 20,000" href="http://au.finance.yahoo.com/news/Jobs-tipped-grow-20-000-abc-3552668963.html?x=0" target="_blank">http://au.finance.yahoo.com/news/Jobs-tipped-grow-20-000-abc-3552668963.html?x=0</a></p>