rate of females. however, it is difficult to establish which way causality is going. are debt levels higher because more households have two incomes and can afford to borrow more? or does the need to borrow more to afford housing drive the decision to participate more? or is it the case that the low level of income growth in recent years has meant that households have more debt than they anticipated and need to work longer to pay it down? research to establish causality has usually found some evidence of a causal relationship running from higher debt levels to higher participation. [ 5 ] however, the analysis indicates that the effects are not that large at an aggregate level. https : / / www. rba. gov. au / speeches / 2019 / sp - dg - 2019 - 11 - 26. html 6 / 21 11 / 26 / 2019 employment and wages | speeches | rba graph 5 the rollout of the national disability insurance scheme ( ndis ) may also have encouraged increased participation of female carers. we know from a detailed survey of ndis participants and their families that parents of those with disabilities work fewer hours on average and are more likely to be in casual employment. [ 6 ] it is probably too early in the rollout of the scheme to see a material increase in the number of parents re - entering the labour market. the survey suggests there has been a slight increase in the average number of hours worked since the start of the scheme, but the percentage of families / carers of ndis participants who wanted to work more hours has not changed. thus two significant drivers of the increase in participation rates of females aged between 25 and 54 over a long period of time are child care costs and other financial factors. the open question is how much more the participation rate of this group will rise. older workers the share of the australian population aged between 15 and 64 years has continued to decline, and is expected to continue to decline. this is due to the ongoing transition of baby boomers into retirement ages. all else being equal, an ageing population will result in a fall in the supply of labour, since the generation retiring is larger than the generation entering the workforce. but there has been a long - term trend for each cohort to participate more than previous cohorts did at the same age. that trend has accelerated recently, and more than offset the effect of ageing on https : / / www. rba. gov. au / speeches / 2019 / sp - dg -

long way from entirely, due to government spending in these areas ), but also in business services and industries like construction and hospitality. is https : / / www. rba. gov. au / speeches / 2019 / sp - dg - 2019 - 11 - 26. html 12 / 21 11 / 26 / 2019 employment and wages | speeches | rba graph 10 we have also used the micro data to look at the people that have moved into some of these growth areas. for example, the share of employment in the health care & social assistance industry has increased from 9 to 13 per cent over the past decade. those entering or leaving health care and social assistance tend to do so from a small number of other industries such as public administration, support services, education and training and other services into health care and social assistance. around 10 per cent of people entering employment from outside the labour market are moving into health care, while a slightly smaller share move into this sector from unemployment. a large share of workers between the age of 55 and 69 years of age work in health care and social assistance, so this is likely to be related to individuals delaying retirement. wages wages growth has declined noticeably since around 2012. as wages growth has fallen, the distribution of wages growth has also become increasingly compressed. this fall in the dispersion in wages growth across jobs mainly reflects a sharp fall in the share of jobs receiving ‘ large ’ wage rises. the bank has highlighted this previously, but i will update that analysis and illustrate the increased pervasiveness of wage outcomes between 2 and 3 per cent across the labour market. https : / / www. rba. gov. au / speeches / 2019 / sp - dg - 2019 - 11 - 26. html 13 / 21 11 / 26 / 2019 employment and wages | speeches | rba the share of jobs that experience a wage change of more than 4 per cent has fallen from over one - third in the late 2000s to less than 10 per cent of jobs in 2018 ( graph 11 ). given that firms are also unwilling or unable to reduce wages, this has meant that the vast majority of wage growth observations in the labour market are now tightly clustered in the range of 0 – 4 per cent. graph 11 there is growing evidence to suggest that wage adjustments of 2 point something per cent have now become the norm in australia, rather than the 3 – 4 per cent wage increases that were the norm prior to 2012. the rising prevalence of wage outcomes in the